(posted on Saturday, August 04, 2007)

Weeklong conference at IU focuses on “thinking how people think” to use mathematics.

More than 150 scholars from around 20 countries are on the Indiana University campus this week for the International Community of Teachers of Mathematical Modeling and Applications (ICTMA) biannual conference. IU is co-hosting the conference along with The Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning (INSPIRE) at Purdue University and the United States Air Force Academy through Thursday at the Indiana Memorial Union.

 ICTMA’s mission is to promote applications and modeling in all areas of mathematics education. The conference organizer said the aim of this week’s sessions is to address a growing need for students to learn not just mathematical skills, but learn a new way of mathematical thinking.

“More and more fields do involve mathematical thinking,” said Richard Lesh, head of the Learning Sciences program in the IU School of Education. “They need people who can work in groups. They need people who can work on problems that take multiple steps, and use tools.” Lesh said traditional math education tends to isolate students, keeping them away from tools they would use in real-world applications.

Lesh said Indiana is known as a center for “thinking how people think in order to use mathematics,” particularly because of the work of longtime mathematics professor Maynard Thompson, mathematics education professor Frank Lester, and others. Purdue is involved because of its strong math and engineering programs. The Air Force Academy is co-hosting because it sought to shore up its internationally recognized engineering, science, and mathematics programs.

“The Air Force Academy came to us with a problem,” Lesh said. “They said ‘our cadets come in here, they’re smart kids. They come out knowing more, and they get worse at being good problem solvers, of being creative.” Lesh said the academy is concerned for its graduates who need an increasingly complicated set of skills. “The person that they need in the military just like other things, for the future, isn’t somebody who just follows rules,” he said.

IU, Purdue, and the Air Force Academy all have faculty and graduate students presenting during the conference at the Indiana Memorial Union. Representatives of the IU School of Education, the departments of mathematics, psychological and brain sciences, anthropology, and psychology will all participate.

The aim of the program is important, Lesh said, because understanding complex systems through mathematics is so vital. “From communications systems, to weather systems, to gadgets—if we don’t understand systems, we’re going to be behind,” he said. “And the mathematics that it takes to do that isn’t formal mathematics maybe of algebra and calculus that people are used to. It’s often a new kind of mathematics and new levels of mathematical thinking.”

More about the ICTMA conference and this week’s program is available at http://education.indiana.edu/ictma-13/home.aspx.

Media Outlets:  the following comments are available as mp3 files on the IU School of Education Website at http://education.indiana.edu/audio.html.

Lesh tells why the Air Force Academy became interested in this week’s conference:

“The Air Force Academy is a good example where they came to us with a problem and they said ‘our cadets come in here, they’re smart kids. They come out knowing more, and they get worse on absolutely every scale of being good problem solvers, of being creative. They know more, and can function less, in a way. And they’re very worried, because the person that they need in the military just like other things, for the future, isn’t somebody who just follows rules. They need to understand those and be able to create their own flow of them. So having them engaged helps us get on the forefront of things.”

Lesh says it’s vital to learn modern adaptations of mathematics skills:

“From communications systems, to weather systems, to gadgets—if we don’t understand systems, you’re going to be behind. And the mathematics that it takes to do that isn’t formal mathematics maybe of algebra and calculus that people are used to. It’s often a new kind of mathematics and new levels of mathematical thinking.”

Lesh describes the new kind of mathematical thinking that’s needed:

“More and more fields do involve mathematical thinking. If it does, they’ll tell you it’s a new kind of mathematical thinking. They need people who can work in groups, they need people who can work on problems that take multiple steps, and use tools. And yet, we’re training kids for—we keep them in isolation, we have them deprived of using any tools as though it were cheating to use these tools when everybody knows that as soon as you try to use a spreadsheet, even, you have to think more mathematically, not less.

For More Information, Contact:

Chuck Carney
Director of Communications and Media Relations
Office:  (812) 856-8027
ccarney@indiana.edu