Ithaca College

Dr. Osman Yurekli and Dr. Matt Thomas each presented research on collaborative work with other math faculty members at the Mathematical Association of America Seaway Section Meeting on October 21 at SUNY Broome.  Dr. Yurekli presented (along with co-author Dr. Matt Thomas) "Divination Process to Explore Ethnomathematics" and Dr. Thomas presented (joint with Dr. Megan Martinez and Dr. Aaron Weinberg) "Using Standard/Specifications Grading to Complement IBL".

The abstracts for these talks follow.

"Divination Process to Explore Ethnomathematics"
This presentation will provide an outline of an introductory liberal arts mathematics course where students develop different methods of understanding mathematics as a human creation through looking at the development of mathematical ideas in different cultures at different times. Students experience various social activities such as divination and marking time. They learn how to reflect on broader ideas about how we discover and create mathematical knowledge and understand the world around us. As a demonstration of our ideas, we will present a divination process that originated in Madagascar centuries ago and is still practiced there to this day. Furthermore, we discuss a generalization of the divination process developed in a capstone course.

"Using Standard/Specifications Grading to Complement IBL"
Standards-based and specifications-based grading methods are gaining popularity as a method for assessing students’ understanding of topics. After a set of meetings outlining a set of both content and process learning goals, three calculus 1 instructors decided to reinvent our course, now in its third iteration. One aspect was to incorporate standard/specifications based grading into the course featuring IBL components. In this talk, we’ll discuss some of the ways we were able to combine these paradigms, as well as some challenges that we faced.