Burmese pythons in Florida: A synthesis of biology, impacts, and management tools

Burmese pythons (Python molurus bivittatus) are native to southeastern Asia, however, there is an established invasive population inhabiting much of southern Florida throughout the Greater Everglades Ecosystem. Pythons have severely impacted native species and ecosystems in Florida and represent one of the most intractable invasive-species management issues across the globe. The difficulty stems from a unique combination of inaccessible habitat and the cryptic and resilient nature of pythons that thrive in the subtropical environment of southern Florida, rendering them extremely challenging to detect. Here we provide a comprehensive review and synthesis of the science relevant to managing invasive Burmese pythons. We describe existing control tools and review challenges to productive research, identifying key knowledge gaps that would improve future research and decision making for python control. (119 pp

Methodological Considerations in the Analysis of Classroom Interaction in Community College Trigonometry

We report analyses of classroom interaction in trigonometry classes taught at an American community college focusing on two dimensions: the mathematical novelty of questions that instructors and students ask and the interactional moves that the instructors use to encourage student involvement in the lesson. The analyzed lessons were particularly challenging because existing frameworks that analyze classrooms did not account for the cases in which the delivery mode was lecture. We discuss the analytical strategies we used and show data to illustrate how they help us in capturing the complexity of classroom interaction and differences between instructors when lecture is the primary mode of instructional delivery. We conclude with suggestions for further work.National Science Foundation CAREER award DRL-0745474 to the first authorPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/96961/1/Mesa_Lande_MetConsClassInt_DEEPBLUE.pd

How Mathematicians Obtain Conviction: Implications for Mathematics Instruction and Research on Epistemic Cognition

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Educational Psychologist on 16th January 2014, available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00461520.2013.865527The received view of mathematical practice is that mathematicians gain certainty in mathematical assertions by deductive evidence rather than empirical or authoritarian evidence. This assumption has influenced mathematics instruction where students are expected to justify assertions with deductive arguments rather than by checking the assertion with specific examples or appealing to authorities. In this paper, we argue that the received view about mathematical practice is too simplistic; some mathematicians sometimes gain high levels of conviction with empirical or authoritarian evidence and sometimes do not gain full conviction from the proofs that they read. We discuss what implications this might have, both for for mathematics instruction and theories of epistemic cognition