Last year, Stan Yoshinobu, Angie Hodge, and I organized a contributed paper session at MathFest titled “Inquiry-Based Learning Best Practices.” Here is the abstract for last summer’s session:

In many mathematics classrooms, doing mathematics means following the rules dictated by the teacher and knowing mathematics means remembering and applying these rules. However, an inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach challenges students to create/discover mathematics.

Boiled down to its essence, IBL is a method of teaching that engages students in sense-making activities. Students are given tasks requiring them to conjecture, experiment, explore, and solve problems. Rather than showing facts or a clear, smooth path to a solution, the instructor guides students via well-crafted problems through an adventure in mathematical discovery.

The talks in this session will focus on IBL best practices. We seek both novel ideas and effective approaches to IBL. Claims made should be supported by data (test scores, survey results, etc.) or anecdotal evidence. This session will be of interest to instructors new to IBL, as well as seasoned practitioners looking for new ideas.

In my opinion, the session was a huge success! We had a total of 22 talks covering a variety of IBL-related topics, which was almost twice as many as any other session. In fact, we had so many speakers, we had to split the session into three sub-sessions over two days. Moreover, most of the talks had a packed audience.

A few weeks ago, we submitted an abstract to the MAA to organize a similar session and we recently found out that our proposal was accepted. Yay! We’ll be soliciting abstracts for talks soon. If you are interested in giving a talk, please contact me or one of the other organizers.

MathFest 2013 takes place on August 1-3, 2013 in Hartford, CT. Mark your calendars!


Dana C. Ernst

Mathematics & Teaching

  Northern Arizona University
  Flagstaff, AZ
  Website
  928.523.6852
  Twitter
  Instagram
  Facebook
  Strava
  GitHub
  arXiv
  ResearchGate
  LinkedIn
  Mendeley
  Google Scholar
  Impact Story
  ORCID

Current Courses

  MAT 226: Discrete Math
  MAT 690: CGT

About This Site

  This website was created using GitHub Pages and Jekyll together with Twitter Bootstrap.

  Unless stated otherwise, content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

  The views expressed on this site are my own and are not necessarily shared by my employer Northern Arizona University.

  The source code is on GitHub.

Land Acknowledgement

  Flagstaff and NAU sit at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, on homelands sacred to Native Americans throughout the region. The Peaks, which includes Humphreys Peak (12,633 feet), the highest point in Arizona, have religious significance to several Native American tribes. In particular, the Peaks form the Diné (Navajo) sacred mountain of the west, called Dook'o'oosłííd, which means "the summit that never melts". The Hopi name for the Peaks is Nuva'tukya'ovi, which translates to "place-of-snow-on-the-very-top". The land in the area surrounding Flagstaff is the ancestral homeland of the Hopi, Ndee/Nnēē (Western Apache), Yavapai, A:shiwi (Zuni Pueblo), and Diné (Navajo). We honor their past, present, and future generations, who have lived here for millennia and will forever call this place home.