When he was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s, teachers and parents told Helaman Ferguson he would have to choose between art and science. The two fields inhabited different realms, and doing one left no room for the other. “If you can do science and have a lick of sense, you’d better,” he recalled being told, in a 2010 essay in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (1). “Artists sta...

Symbolic mathematical software has become inexpensive enough that it is almost practical to require each first-year calculus student to purchase it. But having a program do math for you might not be learning, and does not teach you how to apply it. This paper examines research issues related to learning calculus including cognitive processes, the role of proficiency and a proposed causal model....

In response to the BIO 2010 report on transforming undergraduate education for biologists [9], a group of faculty applied for and received an NIH T36 grant to support curricular changes. We used a three-pronged approach: 1) modifications in the introductory biology, physics, and mathematics sequences for life science majors; 2) an interdisciplinary research seminar connecting the disciplines; a...

Jahanshahloo et al. (Appl Math Comput 153:215–224, 2004) propose a method for ranking extremely efficient decision making units (DMUs) in data envelopment analysis (DEA) using super-efficiency technique and l1-norm and they show that the presented method is able to eliminate the existing difficulties in some methods. This paper suggests an alternative transformation to convert the nonlinear mod...

Home-based peer tutoring was used to teach math skills to 4 girls with deficits in mathematics and histories of abuse or neglect. Girls living in the same home formed tutoring dyads, and each participant served as both the peer tutor and the tutee during the course of the study. At the initiation of the tutoring intervention, an expert tutor provided multiple 3-min tutoring sessions to the desi...

We present a hands-on outdoor activity coupled with classroom discussion to teach students about wildlife habitat selection, the process by which animals choose where to live. By selecting locations or habitats with many benefits (e.g., food, shelter, mates) and few costs (e.g., predators), animals improve their ability to survive and reproduce. Biologists track animal movement using radio tele...