mathematics – Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching

How to know for sure whether a teaching intervention actually improved things

mglessmer — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 05:50:54 +0000

How do we measure whether teaching interventions really do what they are supposed to be doing? (Spoiler alert: In this post, I won’t actually give a definite answer to that question, I am only talking about a paper I read that I found very helpful, and reflecting on a couple of ideas I am currently […]

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Can you make “boring” math or physics exciting by relating it to the adventures of a research cruise in Antarctic? Elin can!

mglessmer — Mon, 11 Jan 2016 07:14:02 +0000

My friend Elin is currently on a research cruise in Antarctica and you really need to check out her blog. She is writing about life at sea, including the most beautiful photos of sea ice. Today’s post is called “ice or no ice” and describes the first couple of days of the research cruise. Elin combines […]

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Why you should shuffle practice problems rather than blocking them

mglessmer — Tue, 08 Dec 2015 09:29:03 +0000

We like to get into the flow when practicing something, and we like to have our students concentrate on one particular type of problem at a time until they have mastered it, before moving on to the next. But is that really the best way of learning? Spoiler alert: It is not! In a 2014 […]

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Will giving your students more structure make them need more structure?

mglessmer — Wed, 18 Nov 2015 10:28:34 +0000

One of the arguments against offering students practice opportunities online and providing automated feedback right then and there is that that way, they will never learn to work independently. Since I am working on e-assessment a lot and with many different courses at the moment, this is a fear that I definitely need to take seriously. I don’t believe […]

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Bridging the gap between conventional mathematics teaching and the topics that engineering students are really interested in

mglessmer — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 10:00:20 +0000

I’m very excited to announce that I, together with Christian Seifert, have been awarded a Tandem Fellowship by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. Christian, among other things, teaches undergraduate mathematics for engineers, and together we have developed a concept to improve instruction, which we now get support to implement. The problem that we are addressing is that mathematics […]

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