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 2026, 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 “Engaging Student Thinking in Real Analysis: One Problem at a Time” by Jerry Morris & Brigitte Lahme. This paper discusses ways to support student engagement with difficult tasks (including in the context of tools that tempt them to skip over the learning). Students are asked to construct or use already familiar arguments, examine specific examples, dig deeper into definitions, theorems and notation, and find flaws in and analyze arguments. The examples come from Real Analysis, but the pedagogical strategies are general.
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 “Ask Questions to Encourage Questions Asked” by sarah-marie belcastro. This paper provides a framework for embedding structured practice (modeling, requests, feedback, and space-making) into existing class sessions that helps students learn to pose appropriate questions and to initiate exploration of those questions.
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!
This year, we selected “Reflective Groupwork For Introductory Proof-Writing Courses” by Jennifer Pi, Christopher Davis, Yasmeen Baki & Alessandra Pantano. This paper discussed two proof-evaluation activities (peer review, critical evaluation of proofs from the internet) meant to promote the acquisition of learning behaviors of professional mathematics such as the ability to read and discuss mathematics critically, reach a consensus on correctness and clarity as a group, and verbalize what qualities “good” proofs possess.
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 “A Synthesis of Mathematical Departmental Change Efforts: Framing, Foci, and Future Opportunities” by Anthony Cronin, Deborah Moore-Russo, Katie Bjorkman & Melissa Mills. This paper is part of a Special Issue on Infusing active learning into precalculus and calculus courses: Mathematics department transformation in challenging times [v.35.4-5] that is itself as return to the change efforts in the Special Issue on Infusing Active Learning in Precalculus and Calculus [v.31.3-5]. This paper presents a meta-synthesis of 26 articles from the earlier special issue concerning change efforts within the teaching, learning, and assessment of the precalculus through calculus sequences.
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 “Linear Algebraic Nodal Analysis: An Applied Project for a First Course in Linear Algebra” by Jeffrey A. Anderson & Bryan B. Nguyen. This paper shares an interdisciplinary learning activity that engages students in using linear systems of equations to model the behavior of practical electric circuits to provide authentic problems from these broader areas that ignite students’ interest in linear algebra.
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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