Primary Source Projects and Reading Apprenticeship in Mathematics History: Advantages and Challenges of Teaching Mathematics with PSPs

The reading of primary sources offers students and instructors a unique opportunity to grapple with original mathematical content. Student surveys in courses taught with primary sources have indicated that students engaged deeply with the content at hand and enjoyed the process. Instructors reflected that student behavior and writing on project work verified these comments [Barnett, Lodder, and Pengelley 2016]. Consistent implementation of teaching with primary sources over time allows researchers to further examine students’ experiences [Clark et al. 2022].

However, this approach can also be quite challenging for students and instructors. As Janet Heine Barnett, an author of many PSPs who has extensive experience with PSP implementation, explains, most undergraduate students will not have the mathematical experience and maturity necessary to interpret an original source without expert guidance [Barnett 2014]. Instructors therefore provide reading routines and instructional scaffolding to explicitly develop these skills. A typical PSP includes both of these components: carefully selected original excerpts and instructor-provided questions, as described in the introduction.

While these support materials are extremely helpful, further instruction and routines may be needed for students to fully engage with a PSP. Assigning a section of a PSP for pre-reading and in-class discussion may not yield the rich discussion an instructor envisions if the students have not carefully considered the original text excerpts and worked through the guided reading prompts. This, then, is the domain of Reading Apprenticeship—the use of routines and norms for participation to facilitate student engagement with primary historical materials.

Figure 4. Sample primary source excerpt and instructor-provided question from the PSP [Barnett 2017].