Janet Bowers

• PhD
• Managing Director at San Diego State University

Teachers in professional development (PD) programs need time to adopt, enact and reflect on what they are learning in the PD within their own situations. To encourage reflective implementation and adaptation of ideas and practices promoted in the PD studied in this article, participants were asked to engage in several small action research projects...

This article presents a case study that details the successes and lessons learned by faculty and administrators at San Diego State University (SDSU) who are in the process of implementing a substantial improvement to the Precalculus to Calculus 2 sequence. Improvement efforts have been informed by national studies of successful programs and center...

The goal of this 5-year $3,000,000 collaborative NSF IUSE grant is to stimulate, and better understand how to enact and support, sustainable institutional change aimed at implementing active learning in undergraduate mathematics learning environments. This project will support ongoing and future efforts focused on increasing student success and per...

The need to incorporate active learning (AL) in higher education has become a prominent issue discussed by major leadership organizations such as the Conference Board of Mathematical Sciences (CBMS, 2016). These calls for AL are based on a large and growing body of research documenting the correlation between AL use and reduced failure rates, deepe...

Undergraduate research experiences provide excellent examples of high impact practices. They rely on inquiry based learning to provide important capstone experiences for the students. However, they are time-intensive for mentor faculty. In an attempt to scale up our faculty’s ability to offer such experiences, we combined a number of projects into...

Upshot . This commentary assumes a constructionist perspective to discuss the choice of methods, conclusions and design goals that Panorkou and Maloney make in their study of students activities with the Graph 'n Glyphs microworld.

310 ConstruCtivist Foundations vol. 9, n°3 « 41 » in irish schools, as in universi-ties across the world, it is a challenge to find the time to collaborate and plan collectively and to reflect on the work done. However, to sustain change and to empower the teachers in their work, collective planning is essen-tial. an element in this is the need to...

This tutorial presents topic models for organizing and comparing documents. The technique and corresponding discussion focuses on analysis of short text documents, particularly micro-blogs. However, the base topic model and R implementation are generally applicable to text analytics of document databases.

The technological revolution that has finally permeated K-12 education has direct implications for modern teacher educators whose “Hippocratic oath” is to best prepare future teachers for twenty-first-century classrooms. The goal of this article is to suggest that the heart of sound technological implementation is to encourage students to use whate...

Designing didactic objects involves imagining how students can conceive of specific mathematical topics and then imagining what types of classroom discussions could support these mental constructions. This study investigated whether it was possible to design Java applets that might serve as didactic objects to support online learning where ‘discuss...

The notion of a classroom mathematical practice was introduced in the reprinted chapter in the last part. It is fair to say in retrospect that my initial use of this construct was largely intuitive: I had not defined a classroom mathematical practice with any precision or clarified how other researchers might identify the mathematical practices int...

Back in 1988, Tom Snyder (of Tom Snyder Productions, one of the most famous early software publishing companies) and Jane Palmer wrote a prophetic book called In Search of the Most Amazing Thing: Children, Education, and Computers . Their thesis was twofold: First, they pointed out that technology, which was just beginning to be introduced in grade...

While discussing the pedagogical challenges of teaching an undergraduate discrete math course, one of our colleagues recently lamented that. Students are ill-prepared for this course…but this ill-preparation is a curious issue. I think it has more to do with the way they learned mathematics than with the content of the previous courses. In this cha...

We analyze the interrelations between prospective and practicing teachers' learning of the mathematics of change and the development of their emerging understanding of effective mathematics teaching. The participants in our study, who were all interested in teaching secondary mathematics, were mathematics majors who had significant formal knowledge...

Our analysis of a college level mathematics course for prospective secondary mathematics teachers revealed that each student developed, at least to some degree, a conceptual orientation for teaching mathematics (A. G. Thompson, Philipp, Thompson, & Boyd, 1994). This initial finding led to a more in-depth question: If we assume an emergent perspecti...

Current trends in middle school curricula highlight the importance of integrating algebraic reasoning throughout the middle grades. The use of innovative technologies offers one exciting way to engage students in algebraic problem-solving activities. In this article, we report on our efforts to design for seventh graders a computer-based instructio...

Much research on student understanding of functions has been characterized by a "multi-representational" perspective that investigates students' efforts to make connections among conventionally accepted mathematical representations such as graphs, tables, and equations. In contrast, a "quantitative" perspective explores students' efforts to identif...

In this article, we describe an approach for documenting students' mathematical development in the social context of a classroom over a prolonged period of time. Our theoretical perspective is based on the view that the ways in which children participate in classroom discussions are influenced by their views of themselves as members of the classroo...

In their recent exchange, Anderson, Reder, and Simon (1996 Anderson, Reder, and Simon (1997) and Greeno (1997) frame the conflicts between cognitive theory and situated learning theory in terms of issues that are primarily of interest to educational psychologists. We attempt to broaden the debate by approaching this discussion of perspectives again...

This paper examines students' mathematics learning in a social context as two versions of an instructional sequence designed to facilitate students' development of a conceptual foundation for place-value numeration are enacted in two third grade classrooms. The same instructional sequence is used in each classroom with the regular classroom teacher...

: This paper discusses a case study that was conducted on a three year National Science Foundation in-service program called the Supercomputer Teacher Enhancement Program (STEP). STEP began in 1993 and continues today past the formal time of NSF support. The goal of this report is to document aspects of the STEP model that have enabled the program...

Online video sharing websites have had a profound impact on the ways that students learn about the world, about the culture, and about mathematics. However, we would like to challenge McLuhan's assertion that changing the media has necessarily changed the message. In fact, the authors posit that the majority of online videos are seen as particularl...

DISCUSSIONS of the role of algorithms in the elementary school curriculum give rise to conflicting notions of how algorithms should be approached in the classroom. These views range from encouraging students to invent their own algorithms with minimal guidance to teaching students to perform traditional algorithms. In this paper, we will discuss an...