Describes distance education courses developed by the mathematics department at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs that were offered over the Internet. Highlights include motivation for the courses, including student needs; incorporation of traditional classroom elements into the presentations; selection of appropriate equipment;…

Gateway tests provide a means of assuring that students in reformed precalculus and calculus courses acquire the algebraic and computational skills needed in courses following these, while allowing the focus of the course to be on the conceptual understanding intrinsic to the reformed courses. However, logistical difficulties plague the…

This report describes how journaling and email were used to benefit both the teacher and her students on a college campus in Georgia. The report outlines how decisions were made about the content of the journals, submission deadline considerations, and concerns about the e-journal process. Benefits to the teacher/professor are enumerated and…

Most research in the area of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) has been designed to compare the effectiveness of instructional technology to traditional lecture-based formats. While results are promising, research also indicates evidence of the steep learning curve imposed by the technology. Yet no studies have been conducted to investigate this…

When students are working with hand held technology, such as graphics calculators, we usually only see the outcomes of their activities in the form of a contribution to a written solution of a mathematical problem. It is more difficult to capture their process of thinking or actions as they use the technology to solve a problem. In this paper we…

We report on a study of the relationship between calculator technology and student learning in two introductory statistics class sections taught by the same instructor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. At the introduction of hypothesis testing and confidence intervals, one class section (A) was given graphing calculators capable of…

This study investigated introductory statistics students' conceptual understanding of the standard deviation. A computer environment was designed to promote students' ability to coordinate characteristics of variation of values about the mean with the size of the standard deviation as a measure of that variation. Twelve students participated in an…

This paper describes two classroom activities and a project that supplement a Liberal Arts Mathematics course's coverage of logic and reasoning. The first classroom activity introduces the writing of inductive and deductive arguments, and the second activity involves analyzing a guest speaker's arguments. The project consists of using logic and…

This document proves that the F statistic can be obtained by squaring t-test values, or that equivalent t-test values may be obtained by extracting the positive square roots of F values. Proof to varying degrees of completeness and accessibility has been given by other scholars, but generally these prior statements, particularly those available to…

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, this issue examines the percentages and numbers of students who attempted and completed both developmental and college-level math. The analysis reveals that a large portion of students either do not attempt or do not complete developmental math coursework. Furthermore, the data show…

Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count, this Data Note's issue examines developmental math referrals, attempts and completions from the 2002 Achieving the Dream student cohort over two academic years, fall 2002 through spring 2004. Although approximately half of the students who were referred to developmental math completed…

In this report we explore the role of reviewer agreement in judgments about alignment between tests and standards. Specifically, we consider approaches to describing alignment that incorporate reviewer agreement information in different ways. The essential questions were whether and how taking into account reviewer agreement changes the picture of…

Lowering the dropout rate of incoming mathematics and science students, and enhancing the provision of mathematics support for freshmen are two important aims of the University of Amsterdam. The approach recently adopted to support first year students is to set up a diagnostic pretest and posttest and use these tests to identify students being at…

As part of an effort to improve community college algebra students' ability to solve word problems, a study was undertaken at Florida's Manatee Community College to determine the effects of using heuristic instruction (i.e., providing general rules for solving different types of math problems) in combination with the TI-92 calculator. The TI-92…

Presenting 12 data tables, this report documents fall 1996 success rates for 11 developmental and developmental-type advanced and professional courses at Florida's Pensacola Junior College. Following an introductory table showing success rates for each course and defining success rate as the percentage of enrolled students who earned a grade of C…