Moving Towards a Research Agenda in Community College Mathematics Education

Abstract

We seek to bring together researchers interested in investigating questions of mathematics teaching and learning at community colleges. This is a key area that is emerging as an important player in the scholarship of post-secondary education. The main goal of the working group is to set a research agenda for concerted efforts to understand issues of mathematics teaching and learning that are particularly significant when focused on issues unique to community colleges. The working group is intended for active scholars in undergraduate mathematics education, new researchers who are interested in investigating teaching and learning in this context, and researcher- practitioners (i.e., community college faculty who have earned, or are in the process of earning, a doctoral degree) who see research in context and teaching at community college as their primary focus. We plan to engage in three types of activities: (1) presentation of salient issues related to teaching and learning at community colleges from diverse areas of scholarship (e.g., mathematics education—both K-12 and undergraduate, higher education, sociology); (2) discussion of ongoing research on specific areas that are fundamental for community colleges (e.g., transition to four year institutions, teaching of vocational students, adult literacy, affect, rationality of teaching in this setting, learning to teach); (3) guided discussion with the goal to establish a research agenda for this work. We anticipate the discussion outcomes to generate a report for the RUME Proceedings, a report for the research subcommittee of the American Mathematical Association of Two- Year Colleges, and a paper for a major journal, outlining this agenda. Taken together these activities will allow us to advance the following goals: (1) outlining a research agenda for community college mathematics; (2) identifying specific research domains and sub-domains so that community college research will become more integrated within the mathematics education research community; (3) increase the visibility of research being conducted at two-year colleges, which will allow us to better identify those researchers who are conducting this research and increase collaborations and partnerships between two- and four-year institutions; (4) outreach to other research domains that have also been engaged in understanding the phenomenon of community college instruction in mathematics, to inform our work and to infuse theirs with insights that come from studying classroom practices, attending to the work that is close to those who are directly responsible for success, namely the instructors, teachers, and designers of curricula.