A part of 3.1 Inquiry on Teaching and Learning Poster + Talk
Jaimal Thind, Assistant Professor, Teaching Stream, Mathematical and Computational Sciences, UTM
Alexander Rennet, Assistant Professor Teaching Stream, Mathematical and Computational Sciences, UTM
Micheal Pawliuk, Assistant Professor Teaching Stream, Mathematical and Computational Sciences, UTM
Parker Glynn-Adey, Assistant Professor Teaching Stream, Computer and Mathematical Sciences, UTSC
In 2019 the authors undertook a major redesign of a large, coordinated, multi-section introductory mathematics course (MAT223H5 – Linear Algebra I). The original redesign was centred around a partially-flipped, active learning model involving pre-class reading and in-class activities, rather than lecturing.
As part of this course students are required to complete pre-class readings. These readings introduce key course concepts, making it crucial that students are able to independently read mathematics. But reading and comprehending a mathematical text effectively requires a different skill set from general reading and reading comprehension skills. However, most students have no prior instruction in this set of skills. Moreover, there appears to be little existing literature about interventions to support mathematical reading comprehension as its own skill (versus general reading comprehension), leaving it unclear how best to support its development.
So, when redesigning the course, the authors opted to create their own “scaffolded” readings and incorporated reading-focused activities, which we hoped would help students develop and practice the skills needed to read a mathematical text.
In this session, we will briefly discuss the redesign, the skills needed to read a mathematical text, and how our readings were designed to support the development of these skills. We will then discuss how we approached the problem of assessing skill improvement. Finally, we will share initial findings, and how they led to further interventions to support mathematical reading comprehension in our course. Time will be reserved to hear from participants about how discipline-specific reading skills are taught in other disciplines.
Thanks for sharing your work! Love to see the critical reflection on the challenges of this work. Figure 3 is fascinating. Did you also look at the change in confidence separately for pre-pandemic and pandemic terms?
Thanks Alison! We’ve sliced and diced the numbers a number of different ways (and still have more to do!) but the pandemic terms, for this question and otherwise, are typically less consistent and/or statistically less signficant, unfortunately. Fig 3 relates to pre-pandemic data. Winter 2020 (pivot to online in March) and Winter 2022 (UTM pivoted back to in-person mid-semester) seem to have been the worst for all subpopulations in terms of this measure.
Thanks Alex. It’s hard to know how to interpret results during the pandemic, especially with pivots between online and in-person teaching, and what the measure might mean in that context.