Meet Them Where They Are

04/16/2024
By Ed Brennen

Whenever Roser Giné needed help with her math homework as a child, she turned to a world-renowned research mathematician who had a major influence on modern probability theory and statistics: her late father, Evarist.

“He had this clear way of explaining things to me. He emphasized the elegance of mathematics, always showing me why something was true,” recalls Giné, whose father’s work took the family from their native Catalonia to Venezuela and ultimately to the United States. “I always wanted to be like him. He is the primary reason why I became interested in mathematics.” 

As an associate teaching professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Giné shares her love of trigonometric integrals and multivariable functions with students in her Calculus II and III courses.

Giné’s expertise is in mathematics education—a field in which she holds a master’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate from UMass Boston. Accordingly, she teaches a pair of courses designed for future math educators: Teaching College Mathematics (for graduate teaching assistants) and Functions and Modelling (for students in the UTeach program who want to become math teachers at the secondary level).

“We have a wonderfully diverse student population that I really value, and I love this department, where I’m given the room to explore what I’m passionate about,” says Giné, who joined the department full time in 2020. She had been an adjunct since 2011, when she began teaching in UML’s former Graduate School of Education.

Like math educators across the country, Giné has noticed a decline in proficiency in recent years. 

“Our students are coming in with gaps in their learning,” says Giné, whose calculus courses are required for students majoring in not only mathematics, but also engineering and computer science.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka “The Nation’s Report Card,” math scores for 13-year-olds fell nine points, from 280 to 271, between the 2019-20 and 2022-23 school years—the largest-ever decline in the assessment’s halfcentury history.

Giné, who taught high school math for 12 years in the Massachusetts communities of Roxbury, Framingham and Fitchburg, sat down to discuss efforts to improve math education.

Q. What is your department doing to address the gap in student learning since the pandemic? 

A. Our chair, Ravi Montenegro, in collaboration with several faculty members, created a precalculus sequence because we felt that students, especially during and after the pandemic, were not as successful jumping right into Calculus I. We also changed the minimum Advanced Placement Calculus score required to get into Calc I and II. Historically, we took students who scored 3 or above on the AP test. But they were not prepared for Calc I or II, so now they have to score a 4 or a 5. 

Q. What are you seeing in your classroom in terms of math proficiency? 

A. I’m concerned about some of the gaps in learning that students are experiencing—and that is not because of the lack of quality education at any level. It’s easy to say, ‘Well, their teachers aren’t doing enough.’ But I don’t think that’s true. I would not put blame at any one educational level. It may be because of the pandemic, but I don’t have research to back that up. It just seems like we place less and less importance on learning mathematics. Whether or not it is something that you end up using in your career, mathematics helps you develop your mind and think critically, which is valuable and powerful. But there are a lot more distractions for students today. I’m very aware, for instance, that there are multiple students in my class that have their phones out. I don’t know why they’re reliant on technology, but it’s everywhere. So, how do we turn that technology into productive ways of learning? 

Q. How are you using technology? A. I’m trying to create resources for my students that go beyond what we can do in the classroom. The calculus sequence can be more project-based, but you have to cover a lot of material, which means that sometimes I have to lecture a lot more than I think is productive. My response to that has been creating resources that students can access outside of class. A lot of the dynamic applets that I use in class are posted on Blackboard so that students can play around with them. I also created a YouTube channel where I’ve made a series of videos that help a lot.

Q. You do a lot of work outside of the classroom to promote math education. Can you share some of those efforts? 

A. I created a math education speaker series when I was in the Graduate School of Education that I have revived. Once a semester, I invite math educators from local schools to talk about their research and teaching methods. Two years ago, I had somebody talk about Babylonian mathematics (developed in Mesopotamia around 4000 B.C.E.), which was really interesting. Carly Briggs, an assistant teaching professor in our department, spoke last spring about team-based learning that she does in her classroom. I also lead panel discussions at local high schools, where I bring professors and students to talk about programs at UMass Lowell. It helps me connect with schools and lets high school students learn about UMass Lowell. 

Q. What do you want students who may have fallen behind in math to know? 

A. Whatever the reasons for the gaps that they’re experiencing, our job as faculty is to make sure that they are supported, that we meet them where they are and that we don’t discourage them. We need to communicate to them that they can learn mathematics if that is something that they might be interested in. But we also have to make changes within the classroom, because if we just repeat the same thing that did not work for students the first time, it’s not going to work the second time. We have to fill in the gaps, of course, but repetition does not necessarily lead to deeper understanding. It’s up to us to think about how to teach in a way where students can be more successful, more engaged and more invested. And that’s work that we should all do all the time.