Comment by edtechdev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edtechdev | Hacker News Reader

Some research:

Students learn and understand college math more when the classes are contextualized (usually engineering, biology, but you can also use everyday examples). See decades of research on situated learning and related approaches. https://careerladdersproject.org/docs/Contextual%20Approache...

Developmental courses can also be compressed https://blog.careertech.org/research-review-promising-practi...

Dual enrollment saves time and money and improves success. Let high school students take college math courses.

Corequisite remediation is the current best practice. Let students take regular (not remedial) math courses, and improve advising and support. https://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/easyblog/future-of-corequisite-... https://strongstart.org/resource/corequisite-mathematics-too...

Contextualization was hugely important for me grasping math. I think one of the most dangerous things we do is relying on people who believe math is beautiful/interesting for its own sake to teach math.

This may also true for some (admittedly also-mathy) Computer Science topics.

There is that.

One approach to calculus is to teach it alongside Newtonian mechanics, with lots of experimental work. Those go together.

The problem is, it's too hard for high school teachers.[1]

[1] https://www.compadre.org/portal/pssc/pssc.cfm

My public high school offered a combined physics-math course (basically two different teachers and courses that coordinated with each other), and it was definitely an excellent way to learn calculus.

We learned derivatives for mechanics around the same time as limits for calc. So everything in calc was properly motivated. I think we moved into E&M around the same time as we got into integrals in calc. We had done basic integrals in the mechanics portion of physics, but got into it formally in calculus and into trickier applications in E&M.

IIRC, the class as a whole did very well on the AP exams. I’m often frustrated by courses that don’t offer similar motivation for math concepts. I think it makes the material far more interesting.

Nice. Once you see how acceleration, velocity, and position are related and how integration and differentiation describe them, what calculus is for becomes clear. After all, that's why Newton invented it. Not because he liked to sum infinite series.

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