Amy Tanner – Associate Teaching Professor
Congratulations to Amy Tanner!! She has been granted continuing faculty status and has been promoted to Associate Teaching Professor.
Congratulations April 2018 Graduates
Congratulations to our majors that graduated this April. Good luck in all your future endeavors!
Mathematics Education Colloquium with Dr. Kastberg
BYU Mathematics Education department invited Dr. Signe Kastberg from Purdue University to give a colloquium on March 29 on relational teacher education. Dr. Kastberg’s research interests are in mathematics teacher education, specifically relational practice including exploring and illustrating listening, trust, care, and empathy, and the ways in which these sustain and motivate student-teacher collaborations. “What we are trying to do was to foster interactions that help others and ourselves to grow, and there will be reciprocal interactions as we make ourselves vulnerable to others [the students] and showing who we are as a person, and then we will feel responsible for contributing to the growth of each other,” said Dr. Kastberg at the colloquium. . According to Dr. Kastberg’s research, relationships have been identified as foundational in professional education including…
Support Teachers to Develop Productive Classroom Discussion
BYU Mathematics Education Assistant Professor Kate Johnson co-authored the textbook “Mathematics discourse in secondary classrooms: A practice-based resource for professional learning”. The textbook was published in November 2017 after eight years of researching, writing, and evaluating. “I wrote most of the material when I was working on my doctorate at Michigan State University, and because of the amount of work and time that I put in, the faculty who is in charge at that time decided to recognize my work and put my name as one of the authors,” said Dr. Johnson. The book provides seven professional learning modules that offer important ideas to assist students to engage in richer and deeper conversations in class, such as what kinds of conversation is more meaningful in learning mathematics. Another purpose of…
3MT
Congratulations to graduate students Haley Jeppson and Emily Hales. They are the winners of our department's 3MT competition. They moved on to the college competition were they both were awarded honorable mention. Click here for more information from the college.
Student Research Conference Winners
Congratulations to Emily Hales, Katelyn Pyfer, and Amy Ross for being the winners of their session at the SRC. Great work! For an abstract on their presentation, please click here.
Student Teaching not only Prepares but Lands Student Jobs
Chelsey Van de Merwe, a student who switched her major to Mathematics Education after her LDS mission was hired 3 months after student teaching at Mountain View High School. Every student in Mathematics Education is required to student teach in the last semester. In Fall 2017, the vast majority of the students who graduated from the program have secured a full-time job. “For a semester I wanted to do marine biology, but I always loved math. After my mission, I fell in love with teaching, then I came back and decided that I was going to teach math,” said Chelsey. The BYU Mathematics Education program prepares students with different courses that focus on task design, lesson planning, observation in public school and classroom rehearsal. In “Mathematics Teaching in the Public…
Digital Literacies in Mathematics
BYU Mathematics Education Graduate Coordinator Dr. Daniel Siebert co-authored the article “Digital Mathematics Literacies,” which was published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy in March 2017. The paper provides recommendations of best practices for teaching digital literacies in mathematics classrooms. The American Library Association defines digital literacy as the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, which requires both cognitive and technical skills. Digital literacy varies across disciplines, and should not be generalized. “A lot of times, literacy educators think these general reading and literacy skills should apply across all different subject areas, and my argument is that when you look at literacy in mathematics, it is very different than literacy in other fields,” said Dr. Siebert. The article is written…
Congratulations Nate Smith!
We would like to congratulate Nathan Smith who was recently named Mathematics Education Outstanding Student for Winter Semester 2018. Nate is student teaching this semester and will graduate in April.
The Importance of Riemann Sum Concept in Solving Integration Problem
The International Journal of Science and Mathematics Education published a research article by BYU Mathematics Education assistant professor Steven Jones, PhD, in August 2017. The article “Teaching integration: How certain instructional moves may undermine the potential conceptual value of the Riemann sum and the Riemann integral” discussed the importance of teaching Riemann sum-based conceptions in introductory calculus classes, which are important for solving science and engineering problems. It is common for calculus instructors to initially teach the Riemann sum and Riemann integral concepts when introducing integration in first-semester calculus. However, they also may send subtle messages to students that the concept is not important. “What I am hoping to do is to remind instructors to really think about not just teaching shortcuts to calculate numerical answers, but what ideas can…