From mth_folk@ONLINE.EMICH.EDU Mon Jul 6 08:39:02 1998 Date: Mon, 06 Jul 1998 08:37:46 -0400 (EDT) From: mth_folk@ONLINE.EMICH.EDU To: dfolk@emunix.emich.edu Subject: Re: Merit Workshop & Uri Triesman (fwd)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 19 Jun 1998 09:54:28 -0500 From: Lisa Murphy (ldmurphy@students.uiuc.edu) To: calc-reform@e-math.ams.org
Subject: Re: Merit Workshop & Uri Triesman John Pais wrote: >Lisa, thanks for your message--your engineering background and community >college teaching experience should be very helpful in your research. I >don't know about the work of Uri Treisman (maybe others don't either). >If convenient could you say a little about it? > >Thanks, >John > >_______________________________________________________ > >E-mail: paisj@medicine.wustl.edu or johnpais@stlcop.edu >http://interactive-mathvision.com/stlcop/TeachingPortfolio/TeachingPortfoli >o.html
John: No problem. Here is what I remember or have handy. Details are available in the literature, although you have to dig a little to find it. Treisman doesn't write much. Lisa
Philip Uri Treisman was a mathematics graduate student and a calculus teaching assistant at Berkeley, I think in the 1970s. At that time, African-American students had a 60% failure rate in calculus, far higher than other groups. Asian students, by contrast, did particularly well. Treisman became interested in discovering what caused that difference. I think he started by surveying instructors for their opinions. Somehow, he came up with a list of commonly believed explanations, such as "Black students don't have as much family support," "Black students don't work as hard," etc. Then, he checked out each of these explanations. He interviewed families, examined transcripts, and generally studied the plausibility of each of the proffered explanations. None of these theories panned out. Maybe some black parents are uninterested in their kids' education, but not the parents of Berkeley students. Those kids were there in large part because their parents were determined to help them get the best possible education. African-American students spent almost exactly the same amount of time, on average, working on calculus as did the more successful Asian students. They had strong high school backgrounds. In short, all of the conventional wisdom was wrong. Treisman might never have found the answer to his question if he had studied only the black students, but fortunately he studied the Asian students also. He thought that success was at least as interesting as failure, and finding the reasons for success was at least as important. He spent a lot of time with the students, paying attention not only to how much time they spent studying, but also to how, when, and where they studied. I think at one point he even moved into an undergraduate dorm to get a better idea of how they lived. He found that the black students worked alone, in their individual dorm rooms or in study carrels in the library. There were only two who worked together, a man and a woman who were engaged to marry one another. For the rest, studying was strictly a solo activity. The Asian students, by contrast, worked in social groups. These groups were almost like families in the way they attended to all of the needs of the members. The students would help one another with a variety of academic subjects, and pass on information about how to navigate the complexities of the university's financial aid, housing, and other systems. There was a very real sense that they were all in this together. Treisman decided to try to teach the black students to work together the way the Asian students did. He also decided not to treat these students like failures, or to make his program "remedial." From his study of their backgrounds, he had become convinced that these were bright, hard-working kids with good backgrounds. They had been honors students in high school. He treated them like honors students in college. He established enrichment sessions for African-American students, in which they worked together to solve challenging problems. Treisman did not give the students the solutions to the problems. Instead, he tried to help them learn how to work together to figure the solutions out for themselves. His students continued to be enrolled in the same calculus classes as the other students, taking the same exams with the same grading scale. Once Treisman got his program up and running, African-American students in his program had a 4% failure rate in calculus. No, that is not a typo. Four percent. Down from sixty percent. Treisman eventually finished his PhD, after being a graduate student for even longer than I have been, and took a job with the University of Texas. In Texas, the largest underachieving group is the Latino students. With a program similar to the one he designed at Berkeley, he brought their average calculus grade up to 3.53, while for non-minority students taught "the regular way" the calculus GPA is only 1.67--and the university continues to teach those students "the regular way." I don't know why. A couple of references that I have handy: