Math Links

From the abstract (full text requires subscription): "Many organisms can predict future events from the statistics of past experience, but humans also excel at making predictions by pure reasoning: integrating multiple sources of information, guided by abstract knowledge, to form rational expectations about novel situations, never directly experienced. Here, we show that this reasoning is surprisingly rich, powerful, and coherent even in preverbal infants. When 12-month-old infants view complex displays of multiple moving objects, they form time-varying expectations about future events that are a systematic and rational function of several stimulus variables. Infants' looking times are consistent with a Bayesian ideal observer embodying abstract principles of object motion. The model explains infants' statistical expectations and classic qualitative findings about object cognition in younger babies, not originally viewed as probabilistic inferences."

A five-year NSF backed study suggests early interventions in teaching and learning

Sending this on to the UMIGO group - we are involving parents of low-income kids with tech&math...

National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) describes the success of the "Emporium Model" in college math teaching with examples of institutions that have put best practices into effect

Study of two Indian tribes, one a partilineal society, the other matrilineal, to discover ability to solve a spatial reasoning task

"experiment performed by Loukas Balafoutas and Matthias Sutter, released February 2 by Science, involved three methods that provided an initial advantage to women in a math competition. The authors found that, in each case, women entered the competitions more readily, but the aggregate performance of the participants was unaffected, and sometimes even improved."

Join Rushton Hurley and Corinne Takara of Next Vista in this discussion of math video projects, video quality and the recent video contest. All events in the Math Future weekly series: http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/events The recording will be at http://mathfuture.wikispaces.com/NextVista

Researchers from Notre Dame and Harvard, in a paper to be published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, discuss Soviet mathematicians' movement to U.S. institutions following the breakup of the Soviet Union, how Soviet mathematical study engaged in different areas of specialization from that of the west, and subsequently "a flood of new mathematicians, theorems and ideas."

Video games are hard, and that's official Super Mario, Donkey Kong and other classic games belong to class of hard mathematical puzzles, and could be used to solve real-world problems IF YOU have ever struggled to complete classic Nintendo games, don't feel bad?- they are officially difficult.

Abstract: Educational videogames can be designed to provide instructional feedback that is responsive to specific actions. However, existing research indicates that students tend to ignore videogame feedback and subsequently use less effective help-seeking strategies. Research on help-seeking in learning environments has primarily focused on the role of cognitive factors, the nature of the help, or issues of timing and frequency. There is a noticeable gap in understanding regarding how to motivate and increase the use of feedback for improved learning. Using a pre-algebra videogame, this study examined the relationship between an incentive to use feedback and math achievement. A randomized-control design was employed, which compared learning outcomes of students who received the incentive to those who did not. Results indicated that students given the incentive to use feedback had significantly higher normalized change scores on math items (d = .53), with stronger effects for students with low academic intrinsic motivation (d = .88 - 1.17).

Abstract "The relation between fidelity of implementation and student outcomes in a computer-based middle school mathematics curriculum was measured empirically. Participants included 485 students and 23 teachers from 11 public middle schools across seven states. Implementation fidelity was defined using two constructs: fidelity to structure and fidelity to process".

Among a number of math related questions on this blog, this post focuses on a particular sequence of integrals

"SRI International, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), and the University of Maine have received a $3.5 million award from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education to evaluate the effectiveness of an online tutoring system for mathematics homework. The research team will study seventh-grade mathematics students and teachers in more than 50 schools throughout Maine using WPI's ASSISTments system. ASSISTments aims to transform homework by giving students instant feedback and tutoring adapted to their individual needs. It also provides teachers with customized reports each morning on their students' nightly progress. Teachers in the study will receive training in how to use these reports to adapt their lesson plans to better suit students' needs."

"The revolutionary calculator that shows the answer only when you also enter a suitable mental estimate." (I have no connection with this company or product.)

"a man who figured out how to have his pi and recite it, too - beyond 60,000 decimals. All it took was intensive practice and a knack for storytelling, a new study finds."

forthcoming book from University of Chicago Press, June 2012

A simple Javascript interface allows you type in the expression and get the derivative

Discusses quantitative literacy (QL) as a student learning outcome and the work of Project Kaleidoscope and others towards effecting the curriculum in that direction

There are plenty of calculator apps in Google Play, but IDEAL WebMath is different because it shows students how to solve a problem.  IDEAL WebMath can help students with addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, comparing fractions, ratios, proportions, place values, and rounding.