Nathan N Alexander

Morehouse College · Department of Mathematics

This article explores how critical conversations engage undergraduate mathematics faculty in a community of practice (CoP) [20] that enhances their knowledge about teaching and learning mathematics for social justice. More broadly, critical conversations are defined as a cooperative learning strategy that can be used to identify, explore, and respo...

Derrick Bell’s (1992) Faces at the Bottom of the Well is one of the foundational texts in the development of the critical race theory (CRT) canon. Bell’s futuristic and other-worldly stories in his volume position readers within important conversations about realism and idealism, theory and method, and liberty as it concerns race and racism in the...

Data science for social justice (DS4SJ) is data-scientific work that supports the liberation of oppressed and marginalized people. By nature, this work lies at the intersection of technical scholarship and activist practice. We discuss this growing efforts in DS4SJ within the broad mathematics community. We begin by defining terms and offering a se...

Justice Through the Lens of Calculus is a freely available MAA Notes Volume for anyone interested in building a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive math environment into their teaching and departmental practices. The volume contains case studies from over 30 institutions along with 8 cross-cutting thematic chapters written by math education rese...

In this volume, we encouraged a broad array of submissions that highlight issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in introductory mathematics programs with special attention to precalculus, differential calculus, and integral calculus and surrounding departmental programs to support students in these courses. The volume features illustrati...

Our research develops a method to house people suffering from homelessness. Shelters that have been built, for example, have had good effects on homeless populations. Since 2010 there has been a 48.2 percent decrease in the amount of homeless people in Georgia. We aim to reduce these instances and use economics (i.e., cost-based analyses) framed in...

Our research team reviewed the differences related to how state officials gerrymander city regions. We reviewed occurrences of gerrymandering within the city of Atlanta and we created three mathematical models of neighborhoods and measured them using the Index of Dissimilarity. Each neighborhood model was analyzed as a "gerrymandered unit" based on...

In this three-­-day lesson, students develop an understanding of community composition and gentrification using mathematical models. Students make use of the Index of Dissimilarity to identify various levels of similarity and dissimilarity possible in a neighborhood community. This lesson guides students through a process of understanding key ideas...

A review by Nathan Alexander.

The research reported in this study examined statistical relations in black adolescents’ identity and self-efficacy beliefs in mathematics. Data for this research study were drawn from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09; Ingels, Dalton, Holder, Lauff, & Burns, 2011) and the study’s first follow-up (Ingels & Dalton, 2013); additiona...

The goal of this study was to understand how students' attitudes were connected to their mathematics learning and achievement. This investigation of students (n = 78) and their attitudes was specific to web-based homework in developmental mathematics courses in a two-year community college located in a large urban city in the United States. A mixed...

Reviewed by Nathan N. Alexander

The purpose of this study was to understand how students' attitudes were connected to their mathematics learning. This investigation was specific to web-based homework in developmental courses in the community college environment. The mixed-methods approach was used to analyze the relationship between students' attitudes and mathematical achievemen...

Issues surrounding gender and mathematics participation and performance have been of growing interest internationally. During the mid-20th century, there was a considerable amount of research indicating that men and women differ in performance and abilities in mathematics. However, the findings during and after this period utilized historical facts...

In this two-day lesson, students determine their best-matched college. They use decision-making strategies based on their preferences and ranked choices. This lesson guides students through the process of select- ing a list of choices and rating these choices based on their preferences in order to find the college most suited to their preferences a...