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 month or two of 2025, 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 “Comparing Student Proofs to Explore a Structural Property in Abstract Algebra” by K. Melhuish, K. Lew & M. Hicks. This paper translates strategies for effective and equitable engagement coming from elementary and secondary education literature into specific strategies for teaching proof-based classes, in this case specifically about isomorphisms of Abelian groups. Not only does this paper put forward good pedagogical advice, the idea about mining the expertise of our elementary and secondary practitioner and research colleagues has great value and potential.
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 Watermelon Meow Meow Outbreak: Enhancing Public Health Education Through Real-World Experience, Statistical Programming, and Infectious Disease Modeling” by Thomas McAndrew, Rochelle Frounfelker & Lorenzo Servitje. This paper is organized around Universal Design for Learning and leverages DataCamp technology to acquire skills in data collection, statistical programming, and infectious diseases modeling.
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 two pieces with new PRIMUS authors!
“Escape the Math Room” by Ana Berrizbeitia: This paper shares a modular escape room activity for outreach, enrichment, or class contexts. The specific mathematical ideas included are compelling and diverse, but one of the paper’s strength is in helping readers understand the impacts of content choices. Another strength of this paper is the extensive set of materials, helping others run a colorful and intricate escape room activity without dealing with the extensive set-up burden. This one is especially fun for me because I’ve known Ana since she was an undergraduate!
“Supporting Calculus I Students’ Engagement in Community-Based Mathematical Modeling” by Sayonita Ghosh Hajra & Zareen Gul Aga: This paper is guided by literature on modeling, culturally responsive pedagogy, and civic empathy to develop meaningfully community-based modeling experiences. I’m impressed by the outcomes in this paper because the authors seem to have generated significant momentum toward community-based action in a short timeline.
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 “Strengthening the STEM Pipeline for Women: An Interdisciplinary Model for Improving Math Identity” by V. Akin, S. T. Santillan & L. Valentino. This paper is grounded in a social identity framework, which allows the authors to focus on affirming the strengths of girls and women in STEM (as opposed to dwelling on imagined deficits), with activities that include dynamic problem-solving. Significantly, this program involves paired activities for middle school girls and undergraduate women interested in mathematics. This paper is from the larger Special Issue on Promoting Women in Mathematics [v.34.5], edited by Sarah J. Greenwald & Judy Holdener.
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, so there is some editorial discretion needed.
This year we selected “Raising the Bar with Standards-Based Grading” by Megan E. Selbach-Allen, Sarah J. Greenwald, Amy E. Ksir & Jill E. Thomley. This paper compares implementation of standards-based grading across institutions to explore tradeoffs and subtleties in decision-making. I’m excited about the national conversation happening in our discipline about the impacts of grading, but it worries me how many people are left to reinvent a new paradigm on their own. This is one of the papers that can support new thinkers and help our whole community move forward more effectively.
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 through the Member Library, and we certainly hope that readers will encourage their institutions to subscribe to and support the journal.]
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Hello, thank you for sharing all the wonderful articles.