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Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, GA – Progress Report

Progress and Activities

The goal of this project is to develop and revise course materials for the Mathematical Inquiry course offered at Oglethorpe University. The two most significant means by which we plan to achieve this goal are through text materials and the use of manipulatives. This past semester, we piloted the preliminary edition of Dr. Sybilla Beckmann's “Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers” with great success. The students found the materials to be both challenging and relevant, and the pedagogical scenarios discussed in the text were realistic and thought-provoking. We found these materials to be an excellent resource for providing “rich opportunities for mathematical inquiry as well as a framework in which to model and discuss appropriate teaching methods. ” Significant adaptation was necessary, due to the length of the text in comparison with the length of our course, and we plan to continue to refine our selection of key ideas and topics most pertinent to our student population. In the area of manipulative use, this semester involved drawing upon our current resources and integrating those into the course.

However, in the next couple of weeks, we plan to order the “kits” that future students will have with them both in and out of the classroom throughout the course. We anticipate that many of our students will opt to purchase the kits at the end of the semester, but the process of purchasing at replacement cost should be more than sufficient to maintain these resources on an ongoing basis for future semesters. In terms of assessing the success of the project thus far, we have access to student journals and student assignments, both of which indicate that the students in the Spring 2004 section of EDU 614 were able to demonstrate their mathematical understanding through procedural fluency, conceptual understanding,and the ability to make connections between fundamental mathematical ideas.

The student response surveys for this course are not yet available, but we expect for the response to the course to be highly favorable. Also, many of the students in the Spring 2004 section of EDU 614 will be taking the Praxis II exam this summer and doing their student teaching in the fall, providing us with more opportunities to assess the effectiveness of the EDU 614 course.