A set of ten students from an urban high school were interviewed regarding experiences in Advanced Placement (AP) and non-Advanced Placement courses in high school. Those participants who took an AP Calculus course described opportunities during high school where cultural capital and social capital lead to a successful experience in college. Those…

For nearly three decades, during which the author taught everything from basic algebra to advanced placement calculus, the author thought of himself as a secondary school mathematics teacher. The notion of teaching elementary school math never appealed to him because of its simplicity. The author stresses that anyone could teach children to count,…

Authority roles among teachers and students have traditionally been hierarchal and centered with the expertise and power of the teacher limiting opportunities for students to act with autonomy to build and justify mathematics. In this paper we discuss authority roles for teachers and students that have been realized in an inquiry-based university,…

A modified version of this project was used during the final seven days of a year-long calculus sequence at the United States Military Academy to introduce students to the nature of integrative learning. Students from different majors were brought together in groups and spent the first few days going over the mathematics material presented here.…

As part of an integrative learning experience at the end of a sophomore Calculus II course at the United States Military Academy, this project served as a multidisciplinary problem-solving exercise that explored the connections among mathematics, biology, and other fields of study. During a seven-lesson block of instruction, this module was…

This project was used in a mathematical modeling and introduction to differential equations course for first-year college students. The students worked in two-person groups and were given three weeks to complete the project. Students were given this project three weeks into the course, after basic first order linear differential equation and…

In this article, we study financing in the real estate market and show how various types of mortgages can be modeled and analyzed. With only an introductory level of interest theory, finance, and calculus, we model and analyze three types of popular mortgages with real life examples that explain the background and inevitable outcome of the current…

A typical Calculus class tends not to be very interactive. Students view the class as passive. The students expect the instructor to provide the information with very little activity or effort on their part. Asking students questions and trying to get them to respond is often a challenge. Many students know the answer, but are scared to respond.…

Though written accounts of collegiate mathematics teaching exist (e.g., mathematicians' reflections and analyses of learning and teaching in innovative courses), research on collegiate teachers' actual classroom teaching practice is virtually non-existent. We advance this claim based on a thorough review of peer-reviewed journals where scholarship…

This paper presents a prototype of a computer learning assistant ILMEV (Interactive Learning-Mathematica Enhanced Vector calculus) package with the purpose of helping students to understand the theory and applications of integration in vector calculus. The main problem for students using Mathematica is to convert a textbook description of a…

First-year university students design and play their own games, including board, computer, and other kinds of games, to learn mathematical concepts and practice procedures for their pre-calculus and calculus courses. (Contains 2 tables and 8 figures.)

The classical problem of the brachistochrone asks for the curve down which a body sliding from rest and accelerated by gravity will slip (without friction) from one point to another in least time. In undergraduate courses on classical mechanics, the solution of this problem is the primary example of the power of variational calculus. Here, we…

Nowadays, many technological means are available to support teaching, such as the interactive whiteboard, class sets of laptop or netbook computers, and high speed internet access. For mathematics education there are advanced software packages for geometry, algebra, calculus, and statistics, which in many cases are available on line at no cost.…

This experiment was designed to determine which assessment method: continuous assessment (in the form of daily in-class quizzes), cumulative assessment (in the form of online homework), or project-based learning, best predicted student learning (dependent upon post-test grades) in an undergraduate mathematics course. Participants included 117…

A sample of 127 high school Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus students from two schools was utilized to study the effects of an engineering design-based problem solving strategy on student performance with AP style Related Rate questions and changes in conceptions, beliefs, and influences. The research design followed a treatment-control multiple…