Breakout Sessions for Thursday, March 13, 2025

This poster details the implementation of a standards-based grading scheme in a Calculus course. Specifically, this course had a "traditional" final exam with very good results, suggesting that the assessment change helped the students learn the material better. Another feature of the grading is that it did not use partial credit, which might have some pedagogical advantages for students who struggle with Calculus and precalculus material. The implementation was not part of a research project, but the outcomes of the course suggest some future research directions.

This poster is meant to help those who want to use standards-based grading or mastery-based grading in their own classrooms, as well as connect people who want to research the efficacy of implementations like this.

The literature strongly supports active learning in the classroom with students engaged in problem solving and peer discussion of concepts. However, not all active learning activities are structured to guide and develop student reasoning. The Learning Cycle, as used in POGIL activities, provides a framework for guiding student learning in science and math. An activity begins with a Model, which may be a graph, equations, table, picture, data, etc. In the Exploration phase, students examine what information is in the Model. Then students use the Model and guiding questions to build their understanding of a concept in the Concept Invention phase. Finally, in the Application phase students apply the concept to a new problem or situation. An activity is made of one or more rotations through the Learning Cycle. In this workshop, participants will identify elements of the Learning Cycle in a classroom activity, discuss how to apply the Learning Cycle to interactive lecture slides and lab experiments, and consider effective Models for use in their classroom.

For a lot of college students, math is something that brings them anxiety. Their math requirement is a course that they “have to take” . There are many common refrains about math courses being weed-out courses or people just not being good at math. Nonetheless, there is utility for everyone in being able to read and write the world using mathematics. After teaching a mathematical reasoning course for non-majors, we found that many elements of the course were disjoint and irrelevant to students’ lives. In teaching the course the following semester, we decided to restructure the course and present the same topics through a lens of application and social justice. In this session, we will present our experience in reconstructing the course and teaching it through this new lens. We will have participants complete an interactive activity from our course to see how students can learn math in the context of social justice. Our activity teaches mathematical concepts by putting them in the realistic context of making money and paying rent. After the activity, we will discuss the challenges and triumphs we’ve faced in teaching the course so far, how students have responded to this different style of mathematics teaching, and open the floor up to comments and questions.