Abstract:

Curriculum Alignment and College Readiness was a joint project of the College of Science, Mathematics and Technology at the University of Texas at Brownsville and the local area school districts. The University of Texas at Brownsville is one of two legacy institutions for the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, the newest university in USA, that serves more than a million Hispanic population in Rio Grande Valley Region, both in USA and Mexico.

The four major goals in this collaborative project were:
- Develop a methodology to analyze and address the shortcomings hindering college freshmen success in college mathematics and sciences.
- Create a framework for discussing, modifying, distributing and implementing the methodology
- Make it a collaborative process between school teachers and college faculty
- Integrate the developed materials into the teaching practice of local school teachers, their professional development, and training of in-service teachers in the graduate program at UTRGV.

To achieve the above goals, we came up with the concept of Curriculum Alignment Cards (CAC). The electronic “incarnation” of CACs is an electronic database, along with the software that allows to retrieve the needed information and establish connections within the information from various fields of the records. This database (CAC) has been incorporated to the curricula for school faculty development workshops, synchronous and asynchronous graduate classes for in-service teachers, as well as in the College Algebra course for undergraduate students.

The methodological foundation for teaching all of the above mentioned classes as well as the theoretical foundation for our research and implementation of the results was the Constructivism Theory and Stage by Stage Development of the Mental Actions Theory (Galperin & Talizyna, 1979), (Bouniaev, 2004). Although constructivism and SSDMA use different concepts, both theories make the same practical recommendations for teaching (Bouniaev & Connell, 1999),The theories focus on developing an “object to study/learn with” ( Connell, 2001) that is the target of an action that a student must master through the learning process. In this context, the “object to study/learn with” refers to a tactile or mental construction of the subject of study.

References:
[1] Bouniaev, M. (2004). Stage-by-Stage Development of Mental Actions and Online Mathematics Instruction. Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2004, 2004, Vol. 1, (pp. 4366-4373).
[2] Bouniaev, M., & Connell, M. (1999). Constructivism and SSDMA as basis for technology use in mathematics teacher education. In Price, J. D., Willis, J., Willis, D., Jost, M., & Boger-Mehall, S. (Eds.). Technology and Teacher Education Annual 1999, 945-950. Charlottesville, VA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education.
[3] Connell, M. (2001). Actions upon objects: a metaphor for technology enhanced mathematics instruction. In Tooke, D., & Henderson, N. (Eds.). Using information technology in mathematics, 143-171. Binghamton, NY: Hawarth Press.