Enhancing Mathematics Learning Through Writing

 

Dora Ahmadi and Kathy Lewis

Morehead State University

 

One of the topics in this paper involves journal assignments in a  general mathematics course. The course is composed mostly of students who are not mathematics majors, and their purpose for enrolling in the course is usually to satisfy the core mathematics component for general education requirements. The journal entries sometimes provide an opportunity for a student’s misconception about the class material to be corrected before an exam. The journal entries also give insight into student attitudes toward the subjects covered in class and toward mathematics in general.This paper will also describe a course experience pairing statistics and English. This pairing provided an interdisciplinary context for addressing two major challenges facing today’s educators: innumeracy and illiteracy. Students registered in the English course were registered in the mathematics course but not all students in the mathematics course were taking the English course. This situation lent itself to performance comparisons of the statistics students taking English versus those not taking the English course. This paper will give comparison results on test performance, course performance, and conceptual understanding of selected statistical concepts.