LARGE LECTURES VS. SMALL CLASSES: WHICH IS BETTER ?
William Hooper
SUNY at Binghamton
When college freshmen arrive on campus for their first semester, they typically find themselves enrolled in courses with three hundred to five hundred students. It is not unusual for a student to have no contact with any of his/her professors that first semester, but instead to deal exclusively with teaching assistants who are either graduate students or upperclassmen. Later, as the student identifies a major and begins upper level courses, he/she will be enrolled in a class of perhaps no more than twenty students. Why do we use these two completely different teaching methods? Is it simply due to administrative convenience? Is one method better suited to an introductory level while the other is better at an advanced level? Or are we depriving the students in the introductory courses of our best teaching efforts? Calculus I, an introductory course in the Mathematics Department at the State University of New York at Binghamton which has between six hundred and eight hundred students every fall semester, is taught using both methods. Half of the enrolled students are put in the large lecture style class with graduate students as teaching assistants, while the other half are put into small classes with a single instructor. This offers us a unique opportunity to study the difference between these two methods and compare their relative effectiveness. Our conclusions may surprise you.
MOTIVATING MATHOPHOBES
Changchao Joanna Su
SUNY at Binghamton
Abstract:
Have you ever had this experience - a student came to you after the first class to tell you that he/she was a mathophobe? What was your reaction? What are your strategies to release a student's tension and phobia? In this talk, I will discuss my philosophy concerning these questions and describe the foundation of our new course, Math 107 - Basic Integrated Mathematics, a bridge between high school math and college level statistics.