Assistant Professor of Mathematics Chad Awtrey presented two talks at MathFest, the national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, in Madison, WI., on Aug. 1-4, 2012.
Awtrey’s talk, “Writing and Rewriting Concept Summaries in a First-Semester Calculus Course,” detailed aspects of a new writing activity that Awtrey has developed for MTH 121: Calculus I. Motivated by the research literature on the effects of a Writing-to-Learn pedagogy, Awtrey focused the talk on the scholarly context of Concept Summaries, ideas for implementation, sample rubrics, and the impact on student learning. This is part of Awtrey’s ongoing SoTL research program, currently funded through CATL, which aims to measure the effects of writing on students’ conceptual understanding in mathematics courses.
In his other talk, “Local Fields with Dihedral Galois Groups,” Awtrey presented details of his recently-published research paper, “Dihedral p-adic fields of prime degree,” coauthored with Elon math major Trevor Edwards (’11). The talk was part of a special session which focused on open and accessible research problems in number theory, Awtrey’s main area of disciplinary research.