I am interested in understanding post-secondary STEM students’ learning and experiences related to mathematical proving and language.
My research aims to understand and improve post-secondary students’ experiences with mathematics. This involves studying the external environment, such as teaching practices or tasks used in various courses, including but not restricted to proof-based mathematics classrooms. In understanding students’ experiences, I view language as an essential mediator and resource for learning and as such, can have a critical role in students’ experiences, especially for multilingual students. In my dissertation, I focus on multilingual international students’ experiences who are historically understudied but nonetheless are important voices to be heard in the field using narrative inquiry. As mathematical proofs play a critical role in post-secondary mathematics education, especially for the mathematics majors and minors, I also study students’ experiences in proof-based courses and investigate possible confusion from task prompting languages they face in proving tasks.
Publication List
Journal Article(s):
Hwang, J., Castle, S. D., & Karunakaran, S. S. (2022). One is the loneliest number: groupwork within linguistically diverse classrooms. PRIMUS. 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511970.2021.2019149
Valentin A. Küchle, Shiv S. Karunakaran, Mariana Levin, John P. Smith III, Sarah Castle, Jihye Hwang, Yaomingxin Lu & Robert A. Elmore, ”Collapsing Spaces, Colliding Places: Leveraging Constructs from Humanistic Geography to Explore Mathematics Classes,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 13 Issue 1 (January 2023), pages 54-69.
Book Chapter:
Küchle, V. A. B., & Hwang, J. (2021). Making group work work. In K. L. Armstrong, L. A. Genova, J. W. Greenlee, & D. S. Samuel (Eds.), Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy for Graduate Students, by Graduate Students (First Edit, pp. 115–120). Stylus Publishing.
Conference Proceedings:
Hwang, J. (2022) Multilingual international students’ mathematics identities in proof-based collegiate mathematics courses: using narrative inquiry. In Lischka, A. E., Dyer, E. B., Jones, R. S., Lovett, J. N.., Strayer, J., & Drown, S. (Eds.), Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual meeting of the North American Chapter of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 2206-2208)
Castle, S. D., Smith, J, Levin, M., Hwang, J. , Karunakaran, S. S., Küchle, V. A. B., & Elmore, B. (2022) Shifts in external authority and resources for sense-making in the transition to proof-intensive mathematics: The Case of Amelia. In S. S. Karunakaran & A. Higgins (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (pp. 100-107). Boston, MA
Hwang, J., & Karunakaran, S. S. (2021). Are we sharing the same interpretations for “Prove” And “Show?”: comparison of an Instructor’s and students’ Interpretations. In S. S. Karunakaran A. Higgins (Eds.), 2021 Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education Reports (pp. 139-146).
Hwang, J., & Karunakaran, S. S. (2020). Students’ Interpretations of the prompts for proving tasks: “prove” and “show.” In S. S. Karunakaran, Z. Reed, & A. Higgins (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (pp. 260–267). Boston, MA
Levin, M., Smith III, J, Karunakaran, S. S., Küchle, V. A. B., Castle, S., Hwang, J., Elmore, R., & Bae, Y. (2020). Math and moral reasoning in the age of the internet: Undergraduate students’ perspectives on the line between acceptable use of resources and cheating. In S. S. Karunakaran, Z. Reed, & A. Higgins (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (pp. 366–373). Boston, MA
Smith III, J., Küchle, V. A. B., Castle, S., Karunakaran, S. S., Bae, Y., Hwang, J., Levin, M., & Elmore, R. (2020). Dimensions of Variation in group work within the “same” multi-section undergraduate course. In S. S. Karunakaran, Z. Reed, & A. Higgins (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education (pp. 597-604). Boston, MA