Arup Mukherjee and I applied for and
received an NSF Course Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement grant to develop
"A Sophomore-Level Transition Course" (Proposal Number 0310753) through the
Division of Undergraduate Education; this grant was awarded in July 2003.
The first iteration of this course was offered in Spring 2004. The
provisional course will also run in Fall 2004 and Spring 2005.
All of the content and materials for the course are posted on Montclair's
course management system, Blackboard. If you are interested in receiving
access to the Blackboard website for this course, please contact me via
e-mail. (jonesm@mail.montclair.edu)
In January 2004,
I presented material on the new course at the NSF Poster Session at the Joint
Mathematics Meetings in Phoenix, AZ. The content of the poster appears
here
as a .pdf file.
The new
course is also the basis for an article that Arup Mukherjee and I wrote that
is to appear in an MAA Notes volume on Innovative Methods Beyond Calculus,
edited by Richard Maher of Loyola University of Chicago. Here is a preview
copy.
In June
2004, Arup Mukherjee presented a paper at the Hawaii International Conference
on Statistics, Mathematics, and Related Fields based on the course that also
discussed our preliminary assessment of the course. The paper, entitled
"A Sophomore-Level Transitions Course: Pedagogy, Projects, and
Evaluation" by M.A. Jones, A. Mukherjee, and G. Weinstein, appeared in
the Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on Statistics,
Mathematics, and Related Fields, June 9-12, 2004, appears here
as a .pdf file.
Gideon
Weinstein, a mathematics educator at Montclair State University, is the
internal evaluator for the grant. He has developed a questionaire to
assess the value of the course. The results of the surveys appear as
part of his evaluation of the course. Additionally, Mark Parker of
Carroll College, Montana has served as the external evaluator of the course.
Both of their evaluations appear here as a
.pdf file.
Arup Mukherjee and I have been developing materials for the course.
We plan on extending at least one of the projects developed for the
course into a module to be submitted to either the UMAP or DIMACS module
series. We will post a preliminary version of the module when it is
completed. Until then, the initial project version of the most likely
candidate to be turned into a module appears here as a
.pdf file.
