Integrative and Contextual Learning in College Algebra: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration with Economics

Many students consider mathematics too abstract and useless for their academic and career goals. Meanwhile, instructors in quantitative disciplines such as economics find many students mathematically underprepared for their courses. The disconnect between students’ perceptions of the utility of mathematics and their life and career may have contributed to some of the under-performance in learning mathematics. Addressing this problem requires collaboration across disciplines to develop an understanding of each other’s needs, more specifically to develop an integrative platform that allows students to apply mathematical skills in interdisciplinary contexts (Ganter & Barker, 2004). We collaboratively designed and implemented an integrative platform that includes creation of assignments and resources that contextualize the course in College Algebra with applications of economics, facilitation of frequent interdisciplinary dialogues among faculty members, creation of a course pair, and expansion of the platform to include 15 sections of College Algebra. This paper describes the process of the design and implementation of the platform

Using Site Visits to Strengthen Collaboration

The SUMMIT-P project is a multi-institutional endeavor to leverage interdisciplinary collaboration in order to improve the teaching of undergraduate mathematics courses in the first two years of college. One goal of this work is to establish collaborative communities among the institutions involved. As part of the project, institutions visit one another on site visits that are structured according to a common protocol. The site visits have been valuable to the project. Participating institutions report the exchange of actionable ideas and feedback; members of the grant leadership team have used the site visits to direct the overall project, and evaluators have refined questions and identified trends that will help their assessment of the project. At a deeper level, the site visits have created a strong sense of community among those involved in every aspect of the SUMMIT-P project

Is it Factor Accumulation or Total Factor Productivity Explaining the Economic Growth in ECOWAS? An Empirical Assessment

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sources of economic growth for the ECOWAS countries and to disentangle the relative contribution of each source. Malmquist Productivity Index decomposition is used to distinguish between technical efficiency versus technological change. In addition, an OLS and panel regression is used to estimate the contribution of various sources of growth to increases in GDP per capita. The paper concludes that 1) there was a modest increase in Productivity Index in ECOWAS countries (11.1% between 1981 and 2015) and 2) both factor accumulation and total factor productivity drive the economic growth with technological change and efficiency change being significantly greater contributors