List of Contents

Winter 2014/2015

Editorial

Culture and Women’s Stories: A Framework for Capacity Building in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Related Fields
Nkechi Agwu, Mojisola Edema, Stella Williams

A Glimpse into the Effectiveness of Mentoring and Enrichment Activities for Scholarship Recipients in a Teacher Preparation Program
Rohitha Goonatilake, Katie D. Lewis, Runchang Lin, Celeste E. Kidd

Constructivized Calculus: A Subset of Constructive Mathematics
Barbara Ann Lawrence

Contextualized Examples in Constructivist Mathematics Pedagogy
Ayalur Krishnan, Max Tran

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Editorial

This new V 7 No 2 issue of the Mathematics Teaching-Research Journal on line restarts our operation after a year of a slowdown connected with the sabbatical of one of the editors. We offer this time two sets of articles connected to each other. We have two papers on the increase of educational STEM capacity. One is from Nkechi Agwu (BMCC,CUNY) describing her unusual project of connecting mathematics to the symbolism and its meaning of the African tribes. Agwu, similarly as Vrunda Prabhu in the case of India, has built an interesting STEM educational bridge between NYC and Nigeria. The second article in this collection comes from Texas A&M University in Laredo, from where we get the report by Goonatilake et al on the capacity effectiveness of the mentoring scheme in pre-service teacher program. Mentoring has recently awakened interest of the profession as the necessary motivational element for encountering challenging while easing teacher/students entry into profession. Mathematics Department at Hostos CC has introduced mentoring of the peer leaders in some of their classes with a significant degree of impact upon passing rates in the developmental classes of mathematics.

The next collection consists of two papers both focused on the constructivism on Mathematics; one – from the point of view of mathematics research, another from the point of view mathematics teaching. Barbara Lawrence, also from BMCC describes to us the constructivized mathematics arguing that its finitness is an asset for understanding central ideas of calculus. It’s interesting to compare this view with the ideas brought by Krishnan and Tran, the authors of Contextualized Examples in Constructivist Mathematics Pedagogy from Kingsborough CC for whom every day’s reality based problems constitute the essence of the pedagogy. Finitness and concreteness are the common factors in these two different approaches based on common vision of mental constructions.