STLF Report to CWSEI and Mathematics Department
STLF: Costanza Piccolo
Period: 17/09/11 – 14/10/11
Submitted: 14/10/11
Specific activities performed by STLF
1) Professional development
 Attended weekly STLF meetings.
 Attended Reading group meetings.
 Attended September Supper Series.
 Attended teaching seminars on the first two chapters of “What the best college teachers do”, run by
Graduate students in the math department.
2) MATH SEI general meetings/activity:
 Held regular weekly group meetings, and individual meetings with each STLF.
 Updated the Math 360 page on www.math.ubc.ca/~cwsei
 Attended monthly meeting with Sarah and the Math-SEI team.
 Met with Djun Kim, Skylight researcher in the Math department, to discuss features of the course
archive and ways to improve its interface.
 Presented at the Lunch Series on Teaching and Learning. We resumed our seminar series with a short
presentation about the newly-developed course archive. The presentation was meant to facilitate further
discussion within the department about strategies to store material effectively and plans for further
interface improvements.
 Attended monthly Working Group meeting with Sarah and other SEI directors.
 Met with Head of department to discuss progress of CWSEI-Math projects and ways to facilitate
faculty oversight of the initiative, also in view of the change of Head.
 Met with Djun Kim and Joseph Lo to discuss ways to assess students’ perceptions of how they hand
their homework. Djun’s students in Math 110 are required to use a course management system (created by
Djun) to submit typed homework. Djun is quite enthusiastic about his system and is interested in getting
feedback from students, so I offered him our help in designing and running a survey.
3) Course-specific meetings/activities
MATH 180/184 workshops:
 Help Head TAs to run midterm surveys in Math 180 and Math 184 workshops. This year Head TAs
are responsible for distributing and collecting student surveys in the workshops. I’ll probably still do
the data analysis once we process the scantron forms.
 Met a few times with the other STLFs to plan orals experiment in Math 184. We discussed questions
to ask in the orals and wrote a sort of script, which may become a good list of questions for
workshop TAs.
 Run oral assessments in selected Math 184 workshops. Student response to orals was positive, but as
the midterm approached students were more willing to answer questions that were not on their
workshop sheet.
MATH 360 Mathematical Models in Science
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Reviewed Lab 3, 4, and 5, and upcoming midterm test. The midterm exam is particularly
challenging. Students are supposed to use computers to analyse a mathematical model (a dynamical
system), which is tricky considering the time constraints of an exam. They can use their own code
developed in the labs, so hopefully the coding won’t be a major obstacle in the test.
Attended labs and lectures.
Run first student survey. Results are attached. Overall, students are happy with the course, they find
the material interesting and sufficiently challenging, but they find the labs too hard and the reading
assignments not very useful. They completed the survey after lab 4, which was a lot harder than the
previous labs, so perhaps their responses reflected their experience in the most recent lab. I’m
working with the instructor to convince him to give students more guidance for the labs.
Plans for immediate future work
MATH 360
1. develop topic-level learning goals
2. administer student surveys to collect data on student’s experience in the course
3. develop some assessment tool to measure students’ skills at analyzing models rather than
constructing models, which seems to be the goal of this course.
Other plans:
4. analyse data collected from the 2010 Math 180 final exams regarding student ability to set up and
solve problems
5. analyse student responses to online diagnostic tests in Math 307 to inform future instructors of student
difficulties.
6. upload materials for CWSEI-involved courses on the department course database.