The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) asserts that a goal of mathematics education, in Prekindergarten through grade 12, is to develop mathematical power for "all" students, and that educational equity is the nucleus of this goal. Nevertheless, researchers have found that equity for all students in mathematics education has not…

"Perspective" is a monthly e-newsletter presenting news and views from Achieve. This issue contains a report on the highlights of the fifth annual American Diploma Project (ADP) Network Leadership Team Meeting in Washington, D.C. Achieve's most well attended annual meeting, but also its most successful to date. While a variety of topics…

Teaching mathematics in real-word contexts is a strategy to make math relevant for undergraduate students. However, very little research exists on students' methods of integrating contextual and mathematical knowledge through writing. This study uses an interdisciplinary writing assignment to investigate the relationship between students' written…

There is growing concern in Europe that some students are not well-equipped to start a Bachelor's or Master's programme, especially when the programme has a strong mathematical focus. In particular, attention is drawn to problems with mathematics in the transition from secondary to higher education. Higher education expects a certain level of…

This article demonstrates how within an educational context, supported by the notion of hidden mathematics curriculum and enhanced by the use of technology, new mathematical knowledge can be discovered. More specifically, proceeding from the well-known representation of Fibonacci numbers through a second-order difference equation, this article…

Most college algebra courses are offered in the spirit of preparing the students to move on toward calculus. In reality, only a vanishingly small fraction of the million students a year who take these courses ever get to calculus. This article builds a strong case for the need to change the focus in college algebra to one that better meets the…

Mathematics is often thought of as a purely intellectual and unemotional activity. Recently, researchers have begun to question the validity of this approach, arguing that emotions and cognition are intertwined. The emotions expressed during mathematics work may be linked to mathematics achievement. We used behavioral measures to identify the…

This paper profiles the student subgroup achievement and gap trends in Maryland for 2010. In grade 8 (the only grade in which subgroup trends were analyzed by achievement level), Maryland had data for racial/ethnic subgroups, low income students, and boys and girls at the proficient and advanced levels. The percentage of students reaching the…

Since Achieve launched the American Diploma Project (ADP) Network at the National Education Summit on High Schools in February 2005, state leaders across the country have been hard at work aligning their standards, graduation requirements, assessments and accountability systems with the expectations of colleges and employers. To monitor state…

This article presents an annotated bibliography of recent research related to academic advising. It includes eight research papers that focus on advising.

There are over 400 proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Some are visual proofs, others are algebraic. This paper features several proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem in different cultures--Greek, Chinese, Hindu and American. Several interactive websites are introduced to explore ways to prove this beautiful theorem. (Contains 8 figures.)

This article presents a Vygotsky-inspired analysis of how a teacher mediated a "thinking aloud" whole-group discussion in a 6th grade mathematics classroom. This discussion centered on finding patterns in a triangular array of consecutive numbers as a phase towards building recursive and direct algebraic formulas. By a "thinking aloud" discussion…

As at many two-year colleges around the country, the pass rate among Montgomery County Community College students who take remedial-math classes, which cover material students are typically expected to master in high school, is much lower than school officials would like. Of the roughly 1,350 new students at Montgomery County who took a…

This article describes several methods from discrete mathematics used to simulate and solve an interesting problem occurring at a holiday gift exchange. What is the probability that two people will select each other's names in a random drawing, and how does this result vary with the total number of participants? (Contains 5 figures.)

This paper concerns computer aided assessment (CAA) of mathematics in which a computer algebra system (CAS) is used to help assess students' responses to elementary algebra questions. Using a methodology of documentary analysis, we examine what is taught in elementary algebra. The STACK CAA system, http://www.stack.bham.ac.uk/, which uses the CAS…