One of the exciting elements of being the Communications Editor is that I get to connect people with the exciting papers in PRIMUS that I think will impact their professional work for the better. In support of this goal, Taylor & Francis allows us (Matt Boelkins, Kathy Weld, and me) to select papers each year as Editors’ Picks and makes them freely available for download to all without login for the first two months of 2024, without requiring access to the journal.
This blog post is intended to share a little about the categories of Picks and why I am excited about these particular papers. In general, I am excited by papers that push the boundaries of the ways we often think about our work as faculty and challenges us to recommit to being our best. I think it’s also really important that PRIMUS, as the most visible journal that engages mathematics and pedagogy for a readership of mathematicians of all types, supports this broad community; so I’m excited that this collection spans so many of our various subdisciplines and professional responsibilities.
EDITORS’ CHOICE: I see this category as our opportunity to assert a stronger editorial perspective into the higher education mathematics discussion. Is there an assumption that is taken as axiomatic that we need to reconsider? Are there voices that are not being heard? Where do we need to be pushed a little further out of our comfort zones? Are there ideas that need to be shared across boundaries?
This year, we selected “Flexible Thinking with Double Number Lines” by Keith Nabb. This paper discusses a powerful representation that is famous in elementary mathematics education and pre-service teacher education: the double-labeled numberline. This paper explores a large collection of examples that connect this representation with arithmetic and early algebraic concepts. If you have ever felt helpless when trying to support college students who don’t have strong number sense or who are traumatized by past learning about fractions, reading this paper can give you ideas for building up their multiplicative thinking.
FROM THE ARCHIVES: Similarly to the Editors’ Choice, we select a paper from the Archives, perhaps because it was ahead of its time or has become highly salient again. Is there an idea from which we can learn without having to recreate it from the ground up?
This year, we selected “The Flipped Classroom, Lethal Mutations, and the Didactical Contract: A Cautionary Tale” by Spencer Bagley. This paper discusses a reform effort that went poorly. In my reading, the instructor approached a flipped class as a lecture-based class with the lecture removed from classtime rather than reimagining classtime in a way that was supported by moving away from lecture. Bagley, who is not the instructor, listened to the students’ experiences in the course and is able to share some lessons learned from a course in which the expected relationships between students, faculty, and courses are broken. Readers will also be interested in a follow-up paper in which Anil Ventakesh and Bagley read the Lethal Mutations paper with students as an intervention in a course with a deteriorating classroom culture.
NEW AUTHOR: Writing for PRIMUS is different from the writing almost all of us were trained to do, and it takes serious work to learn this new skill, whether the authors are junior faculty or more seasoned colleagues writing about the classroom for the first time. I am very grateful for the work of the editors and reviewers in supporting authors in this learning, but we also want to celebrate authors whose first contribution to PRIMUS is exemplary.
This year, we selected “Illustrating Student Mathematics Identities Through a Network of Identity Frameworks” by Matthew Voigt, Lynda Wynn, Katie Bjorkman & Stanley Lo. This paper shares, applies, and integrates three theoretical frameworks that help scholars understand aspects of identity. The student data for this analysis is taken from the famous Catwalk calculus modeling task in which questions of motion and speed are approximated from a sequence of still photographs, so the paper also shares interesting student thinking about a task many readers could use in their courses. [Also, pictures of a kitty!]
SPECIAL ISSUES: Guest Editors do a lot of exciting work in recruiting high quality papers focused on topical themes for PRIMUS, and we are often spoiled for choice in terms of excellent special issues when selecting papers from special issues that we would like to amplify. These individual papers are great, but making them freely available also helps draw readers into the special issue in general.
This year, we selected “Integration of Biology, Mathematics and Computing in the Classroom Through the Creation and Repeated Use of Transdisciplinary Modules” by Mentewab Ayalew, Derrick Hylton, Jeticia Sistrunk, James Melton, Kiandra Johnson & Eberhard Voit. This paper offers a response to the pedagogical challenges of supporting student learning about multiple disciplines at the same time (and the skills of moving between them). The paper discusses a module that integrates knowledge in waves by returning to the same phenomenon repeatedly from different perspectives. This paper is part of the larger Special Issue on Mathematics and the Life Sciences [v32.2-3], edited by Raina Robeva, Timothy D. Comar, and Carrie Diaz Eaton.
MOST DOWNLOADED: We select a paper that is already highly active in part because this activity is evidence that people are finding this paper useful and compelling. This suggests to me that the subset of people who already had access to this paper, and people who went out of their way to get this paper, believe that this paper needs to be ready by a wider cross-section of our community.
It might seem like this one is not a choice, but not all papers are uniformly accessible in time or method. This year, our Editor-in-Chief selected “Why Should that Convince Me?: Teaching Toulmin Analysis Across the Curriculum” by Brian P Katz (BK), Elizabeth Thoren & Vanessa Hernandez. This paper discusses Toulmin analysis, a framework for analyzing justifications coming from the field of Rhetoric that has been used for decades by math education researchers. This paper goes further to describe strategies for teaching students about Toulmin analysis as an effort to teach them about (and help them critique) the mental habits of mathematical justification and proving. [Disclosure, this is me! I’m honored that Matt wanted to amplify this work further.]
Please download, read, and discuss these papers, and please help us share these pieces of high quality writing widely! [And as always, MAA members can access all of PRIMUS, and we certainly hope that readers will encourage their institutions to subscribe to and support the journal.]
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