2020 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

The landscapes of many elementary, middle, and high school math classrooms have undergone major transformations over the last half-century, moving from drill-and-skill work to more conceptual reasoning and hands-on manipulative work. However, if you look at a college level calculus class you are likely to find the main difference is the professor now has a whiteboard marker in hand rather than a piece of chalk. It is possible that some student work may be done on the computer, but much of it contains the same type of repetitive skill building problems. This should seem strange given the advancements in technology that allow more freedom than ever to build connections between different representations of a concept.

Several class activities have been developed using a combination of approaches, depending on the topic. Topics covered in the activities include Riemann Sums, Accumulation, Center of Mass, Volumes of Revolution (Discs, Washers, and Shells), and Volumes of Similar Cross-section. All activities use student note outlines that are either done in a whole group interactive-lecture approach, or in a group work inquiry-based approach. Some of the activities use interactive graphs designed on desmos.com and others use physical models that have been designed in OpenSCAD and 3D-printed for students to use in class. Tactile objects were developed because they should provide an advantage to students by enabling them to physically interact with the concepts being taught, deepening their involvement with the material, and providing more stimuli for the brain to encode the learning experience. Web-based activities were developed because the topics involved needed substantial changes in graphical representations (i.e. limits with Riemann Sums).

Assessment techniques for each topic include online homework, exams, and online concept questions with an explanation response area. These concept questions are intended to measure students’ ability to use multiple representations in order to answer the question, and are not generally computational in nature. Students are also given surveys to rate the overall activities as well as finer grained survey questions to try and elicit student thoughts on certain aspects of the models, websites, and activity sheets. We will report on student responses to the activity surveys, looking for common themes in students’ thoughts toward specific attributes of the activities. We will also compare relevant exam question responses and online concept question results, including common themes present or absent in student reasoning.