Attracting Students to Mathematics through Building a Community of Problem Solvers
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David Ash
Jun 30, 2024, 7:58:28 PM6/30/24
to Competition Corner Participant Discussion
Hi folks,
I just happened to notice this presentation by Gabi and István that was given at the online JMM back in 2022. I didn't comment earlier because I didn't see this presentation before now. Since a PDF of the presentation seems to be freely available online, I'm taking the liberty of attaching it here.
It would be interesting to know: was there any interesting feedback from the meeting, or any useful take aways? Is there any kind of a more formal version of the presentation, such as a paper, or are these slides what is available?
My own first thought is that the challenge is not so much one of attracting student interest but rather retaining student interest. George has sometimes framed things in terms of a difference between a math talent search and math talent development. I agree with that way of looking at things. There is already a strong ecosystem devoted to locating mathematical talent or determining who is "good at math". Much less is done to retain students' interest after that talent is located, and IMHO math does a weaker job at retaining its talent than other fields--and I include both other STEM fields and other fields outside STEM in that assessment.
Even in this group, I would argue that the challenge in retaining student interest is very evident. The members of this group presumably at one time were among the best and the brightest mathematically in an entire country--and one of the more populous and economically powerful countries at that. If you look at the sidebars giving bios in the Competition Corner book, relatively few members of this group have stayed with math throughout their careers. It is great that math students are "multi talented" and have a range of interests, but one might expect more success stories within math itself from a group identified from high school years as being among the very best in the country (or continent in the case of those of us originally from Canada).
Therefore I think George's point that the focus needs to be as much on talent development as talent search--and the former is sometimes lacking--remains valid. We need to both attract students to math and find ways to retain them after we've attracted them.
It would be interesting to know: was there any interesting feedback from the meeting, or any useful take aways? Is there any kind of a more formal version of the presentation, such as a paper, or are these slides what is available?
My own first thought is that the challenge is not so much one of attracting student interest but rather retaining student interest. George has sometimes framed things in terms of a difference between a math talent search and math talent development. I agree with that way of looking at things. There is already a strong ecosystem devoted to locating mathematical talent or determining who is "good at math". Much less is done to retain students' interest after that talent is located, and IMHO math does a weaker job at retaining its talent than other fields--and I include both other STEM fields and other fields outside STEM in that assessment.
Even in this group, I would argue that the challenge in retaining student interest is very evident. The members of this group presumably at one time were among the best and the brightest mathematically in an entire country--and one of the more populous and economically powerful countries at that. If you look at the sidebars giving bios in the Competition Corner book, relatively few members of this group have stayed with math throughout their careers. It is great that math students are "multi talented" and have a range of interests, but one might expect more success stories within math itself from a group identified from high school years as being among the very best in the country (or continent in the case of those of us originally from Canada).
Therefore I think George's point that the focus needs to be as much on talent development as talent search--and the former is sometimes lacking--remains valid. We need to both attract students to math and find ways to retain them after we've attracted them.
Any thoughts? Again--has there been any follow up? It looks like it was a solid presentation but a quick search on scholar.google.com didn't turn up any follow up.
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