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A majority of young collegiate male and female students lose interest in mathematical topics within their first two years of study. Some lose interest because they fail to see the correlation between their course studies and their long term career goals, for most minority females, a lack of mentoring plays a big part in their loss of interest in STEM (Science Technology Mathematics and Engineering) subjects, others struggle due to the rigorous pace of their STEM courses, and others struggle due to grade inflation from previous class experiences. Why is it important that we work together to change the pattern this pattern of disinterest? 1) Because mathematics is the language of science and is the means of quantitative modeling to describe the physical world. 2) Because strong mathematic skills are a gateway to productive inter-disciplinary exchanges and quality understanding of STEM subjects. 3) Because mathematics is a critical literacy needed for the United States’ workforce. This research project will explore enhancing mathematic learning outcomes, using social-cultural cognition theory to train freshmen minority college students to develop PLEs (Personal Learning Environments), leveraging social media tools, and extended learning communities to enhance their learning capabilities.

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

The PLE approach will help utilize the learning instructional model and the “whiteboard tradition” will be restored by active communal learning environments in which different incorporate theories & principles, which also can help students excel in the process of examination for existing problems in innovative & unique ways to utilize their mathematical knowledge for weekly discussions. The students will be matched in groups from 3-5 with their peers each week during lectures, they all have the ability to share notes and all learn effectively & actively from each other. They will be required to present the group’s understanding or the knowledge obtained from the previous lesson of that week. Homework assignments are replaced with these courses within the weekly experimental mathematics analysis project. It will be interdisciplinary-based for students and they are required to complete a project topic selected by their instructor.

METHODS AND DATA

Twitter’s popularity as an information source has led numerous communities utilizing it in various domains including Humanitarian Assistance, Disaster Relief to provide situational awareness to a crisis situation. Researchers have used Twitter to predict the occurrence of earthquakes and identify relevant users to follow to obtain disaster related information [18-22]. Twitter is many things to many people, for mathematics instruction at UAPB is a tool to exploit student engagement of minorities.

PRELIMINARY FINDINGS

IMPLICATIONS

This better helps students to engage in their learning environment while being social and engaging in an overall better class lecture. It also gives students better opportunities to learn in a more digital and graphic forms of mathematics rather the standard white-board, method of teaching. Students also have a more reliable way of relation to the lectures given each day.

REFERENCES

[1] A. L. Griffith, "Persistence of women and minorities in STEM field majors: Is it the school that matters?," Economics of Education Review, vol. 29, pp. 911-922, 2010. [2] A. V. Maltese and R. H. Tai, "Pipeline persistence: Examining the association of educational experiences with earned degrees in STEM among US students," Science Education, vol. 95, pp. 877-907, 2011. [3] K. A. Smith, T. C. Douglas, and M. F. Cox, "Supportive teaching and learning strategies in STEM education," New Directions for Teaching and Learning, vol. 2009, pp. 19-32, 2009. [4] R. G. Ehrenberg, "Analyzing the factors that influence persistence rates in STEM field, majors: Introduction to the symposium," Economics of Education Review, vol. 29, pp. 888-891, 2010. [5] T. Dreyfus, "Why Johnny can't prove," Educational studies in mathematics, vol. 38, pp. 85-109, 1999. [6] C. Williams, O. Akinsiku, C. Walkington, J. Cooper, A. Ellis, C. Kalish, et al., "Understanding students’ similarity and typicality judgments in and out of mathematics," in Proceedings of the 32nd annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, 2011. [7] P. T. Terenzini, L. Springer, P. M. Yaeger, E. T. Pascarella, and A. Nora, "First- generation college students: Characteristics, experiences, and cognitive development," Research in Higher education, vol. 37, pp. 1-22, 1996. [8] E. T. Pascarella, C. T. Pierson, G. C. Wolniak, and P. T. Terenzini, "First- generation college students: Additional evidence on college experiences and outcomes," Journal of Higher Education, pp. 249-284, 2004. [9] T. C. Gilmer, "An understanding of the improved grades, retention and graduation rates of STEM majors at the Academic Investment in Math and Science (AIMS) Program of Bowling Green State University (BGSU)," Journal of STEM Education, vol. 8, pp. 11-21, 2007. [10] K. Eagan, F. Herrera, J. Sharkness, S. Hurtado, and M. Chang, "Crashing the gate: identifying alternative measures of student learning in introductory science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses," American Research in Education Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 2011. [11] X. Chen, "STEM Attrition: College Students' Paths into and out of STEM Fields. Statistical Analysis Report. NCES 2014-001," National Center for Education Statistics, 2013.

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS  

[12] J. S. Hyde and J. E. Mertz, "Gender, culture, and mathematics performance," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 106, pp. 8801-8807, 2009. [13] J. G. Stout, N. Dasgupta, M. Hunsinger, and M. A. McManus, "STEMing the tide: Using ingroup experts to inoculate women's self-concept in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)," Journal of personality and social psychology, vol. 100, p. 255, 2011. [14] J. Fairweather, "Linking evidence and promising practices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) undergraduate education," Board of Science Education, National Research Council, The National Academies, Washington, DC, 2008. [15] R. McCartney and K. Sanders, "First-year students' social networks: learning computing with others," in Proceedings of the 14th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research, 2014, pp. 159-163. [16] J. Tenenberg and M. Knobelsdorf, "Out of our minds: a review of sociocultural cognition theory," Computer Science Education, vol. 24, pp. 1-24, 2014. [17] L. P. Steffe, P. Nesher, P. Cobb, B. Sriraman, and B. Greer, Theories of mathematical learning: Routledge, 2013. [18] M. Berger, "Vygotsky’s theory of concept formation and mathematics education," in Proceedings of the 29th Conference of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Bergen, Norway, 2005, pp. 153-160. [19] I. A. Zualkernan, "Using Soloman-Felder Learning Style Index to Evaluate Pedagogical Resources for Introductory Programming Classes," presented at the Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering, 2007. [20] A. T. Chamillard and R. E. Sward, "Learning styles across the curriculum," presented at the Proceedings of the 10th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Caparica, Portugal, 2005. [21] N. S. Grant, "A study on critical thinking, cognitive learning style, and gender in various information science programming classes," presented at the Proceedings of the 4th conference on Information technology curriculum, Lafayette, Indiana, USA, 2003. [22] V. C. Galpin, I. D. Sanders, and P.-y. Chen, "Learning styles and personality types of computer science students at a South African university," presented at the Proceedings of the 12th annual SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education, Dundee, Scotland, 2007.

This project is housed at the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (UAPB), a student-focused Historically Black College and University (HBCU), within the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Mathematics is a major bottleneck for many students that enter the university. For many incoming first-generation minority college students there is a cognitive conflict that student’s experience in which many of the mathematic skills they learned in their K-12 training, contradict the mathematics practices expected at the university level. According to Dreyfus [1-2], and other researchers many of these students suffer from a cognitive gap, in which when the students are confronted with new knowledge, which conflicts with pervious knowledge, a cognitive conflict is created. Mathematic courses are still bottleneck courses for many students matriculating at UAPB. Courses are still are taught in isolation from the other disciplines, using standard lecture style presentations and instructors overlook the natural connections with other disciplines such as, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, and Engineering. For instance, the typical incoming freshmen at UAPB, has an ACT score of 15~19, and enrolls in remedial mathematics course: •  Math 1310 Elementary Algebra (STEM major) •  Math 1359 Enhance Quantitative Literacy (Non-STEM). Very few incoming freshmen score the required ACT score of 19 to enter directly into Math 1330 College Algebra or Math 1550 Precalculus, which is designed to allow students to investigate, and apply general function properties with algebraic mathematics and trigonometric functions to solve mathematical problems. As a result students typical mathematics matriculation at UAPB requires four semesters on average rather the two semesters required for non-STEM, three for STEM majors. Many first-generate minority STEM majors are ill prepared in mathematics resulting in a low retention within disciplines in the first two years of study. Therefore, our approach is to train students leverage cultural frameworks they are already familiar with composed of: (1) Communal learning via experiential mathematic analysis. (2) Communal learning via social media micro-blogging. (3) Problem modeling via tangible daily tasks.

Dr. Karl Walker, Robin Ghosh, Leonardo Vieira, Chirone Gamble Jr, Adrian Thompson, Javaughn Love, Xavier Graves, Tiffany Howell

Mathematics Personal Learning Environments, Leveraging Social Media and Self-Regulated Learning

Project Title: Mathematics STEM Undergraduate Apprentice Program Award Number: P120A150078 Funding Agency: US Department of Education Project Coordinator: Robin Ghosh

Figure 1: Clustering of students around a given mathematics topic.

Figure 2: Representation of centrality gives us the idea of who is the most important person on a network.