29 - Where Do We Go From Here? Creating a National Initiative to Refocus the Courses below Calculus

Summary

Background on subsequent activities

In the four-month period following the Rethinking the Preparation for Calculus conference in October 2001, there were three other invited conferences regarding the undergraduate mathematics curriculum.

1. CRAFTY's Curriculum Foundations Summary Workshop (November 2001), organized by Bill Barker and Susan Ganter and supported by the NSF and the Calculus Consortium for Higher Education [1]. CRAFTY (the MAA committee on Curriculum Renewal Across the First Two Years) had previously organized a series of 11 workshops in which leading educators from 17 different quantitative disciplines came together to discuss and inform the mathematics community of the mathematical needs of their students today. The summary workshop was held to unify the suggestions from the individual workshops.

2. The Forum on Quantitative Literacy (December 2001), organized by Bernard Madison, sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts [2].

3. Reforming College Algebra (February 2002), organized by Don Small on behalf of the MAA Task Force on the First College Level Mathematics Course and supported by the Consortium of Historically Black Colleges and Universities [3].

Each of these conferences focused on the mathematical needs of students in courses below calculus. Although the CRAFTY Curriculum Foundations Workshop did not look at these courses specifically, the recommendations from most of the quantitative disciplines were directed at courses such as college algebra and precalculus, because these are the courses that provide the mathematical foundation for students in most other disciplines.