Spring 2025 Schedule

Title: Supporting Student Interests in Applied Math and Probability and Statistics

Description: Katie Slyman will facilitate a discussion to brainstorm how the department can support students with interests in applied mathematics and or probability and statistics.  

Title: Shared Resources and Scripts for Supporting Students

Description: Last year the seminar created a draft document collecting resources for supporting students and scripts for responding to various situations.  Today we'll workshop that document and get it ready to be shared.

Title: Advising Materials

Description: Developing materials to support undergraduate advising -- flow chart of prerequisites, recommended clusters of courses (pure math, applied math, prob/stat), potential pathways.  

Title: Introduction to Standards Based Grading

Description: I'll give a brief overview of Standards Based Grading and provide some examples, drawn from Clark and Talbert's Grading for Growth. 

Title: Thriving Students: How to Get There With Evidenced-Based Paradigms, Principles, and Pedagogy. 

Abstract: Decades of research into what works in education has yielded a number of high-impact paradigms and practices proven to cultivate broad student success. In this part-talk-part-conversation, we will explore and discuss some of those (including Fink's Integrated Course Design model, and the Assessment Of, For, and As Learning model); how we can incorporate them into our courses; and what impacts on students, their academic success, and their general wellbeing we should expect to see. We will also discuss potential implementation challenges and how to troubleshoot the results when they diverge from the anticipated ones. 

Oscar E. Fernandez is Past Program Director (2022–2025), Wellesley College HHMI Inclusive Excellence Grant, Past Faculty Director (2018–21), Wellesley College Pforzheimer Learning and Teaching Center, Past Faculty Director (2019–21), Wellesley College Mellon Evidence-Based Teaching Initiatives Grant, Professor of Mathematics, Wellesley College

Title: The Research on Class Schedules

Description: A look at the extant research on when and how classes are scheduled is inconclusive, but there are some interesting findings to consider.  

Title: MATH4426 Probability Discussion

Description: What essential prerequisite material do students typically lack when taking Probability? Where in the curriculum do students hit roadblocks? How can we best advise students to approach the course, including where this class should be sequenced relative to other major and minor requirements. Jamie will share an overview of the class and its content and we will have an open discussion about the above questions. 

Dr. John Hall, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics at Yale, will share about the Online Experiences for Yale Scholars (ONEXYS) program which he organizes. ONEXYS helps prepare entering students for the rigors of quantitative work in their future courses. The program uses videos, real-time discussions with other ONEXYS students, advice and mentoring from the current students who serve as ONEXYS coaches, and a variety of problem sets, quizzes, etc to help students prepare for the transition.  Many of the quantitative concepts and skills covered in ONEXYS are drawn directly from Yale’s introductory math courses and placement exams, and are utilized across disciplines in Yale’s curriculum—ranging from economics to chemistry to political science.

At the end, we will discuss how elements of this program may help us address preparation issues for incoming BC students who take Calculus or other math courses.  

Boston College prides itself on maintaining an expectation of academic excellence among our student athlete population. However, several mathematics instructors have noticed consistent issues among a subset of the student athlete population in their classes, including in work quality and attendance, that indicate a disconnect with this expectation. The Teaching Seminar will host an internal department-only discussion to aggregate these issues in order to later share with Student Athlete Academic Services, maintaining the department's ongoing efforts to find ways to partner with SAAS in supporting students and setting clear expectations. 

Title: 

Description: Claire Frechette will be sharing with us how she uses Sage with students in her Cryptography course.