Education References

Here are some references that I have found interesting and/or useful regarding math education.

Books:

• What's Math Got To Do With It? Helping Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Subject--and Why It's Important for America, by Jo Boaler, 2009. This is an excellent examination of the issues regarding math education today in the USA. A must-read for every parent.
• A decade of the Berkeley Math Circle: the American experience, by Zvezdelina Stankova and Tom Rike, 2008. A discussion of the mathematical activities of the Berkeley Math Circle from its first ten years, focusing on the mathematics of the circles.
• Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States, by Liping Ma, 1999. This book is the result of a comparative study of elementary school mathematics teaching in China and the U.S. Since it came out it has become a standard reference for people involved in math education. Even though it deals with fundamental (i.e. elementary school) mathematics, it makes for extremely interesting reading and applies to mathematics education at all levels. (A review in the AMS Notices ran in September 1999.)
• What the Best College Teachers Do, by Ken Bain, 2004. Ken Bain is the director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at NYU. He ran a study over the course of a decade on over 100 of the best college teachers in the country, throughout multiple disciplines, looking at their methods and approaches to teaching. This book contains the results of that study and is aimed at people who are involved in college teaching at any level and in any discipline.
• Teaching First: A Guide for New Mathematicians, Thomas Rishel, 2000. This is an excellent book with great insights for beginning teachers.
• How to Teach Mathematics, 2nd edition, Steve Krantz, 1999. This is a primer on how to teach mathematics with particular emphasis on the college level. The second edition also contains a large appendix with essays by other mathematicians and mathematics educators in response to the first edition of this book.
• The Great Curriculum Debate: How Should We Teach Reading and Math?, Tom Loveless, Editor, 2001. This is a book of essays regarding the "Math Wars" and the "Reading Wars" which took place during the 1990's.
• Mathematical Cognition, James M. Royer, ed, 2003. This is a collection of essays regarding various aspects of cognitive psychology with respect to mathematical cognition. It has a variety of different viewpoints, as well as an essay on the history of K-12 math education in the U.S. (There is an online preprint of this particular essay as well.)

Articles and Other References:

• Purposes and Methods of Research in Mathematics Education, Alan H. Schoenfeld, AMS Notices, June/July 2000.
• Studying Students Studying Calculus: A Look at the Lives of Minority Mathematics Students in College, Uri Treisman, The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 23, No. 5 (Nov., 1992), pp. 362-372
• Teaching Research: Encouraging Discoveries, Francis Su, American Mathematical Monthly, Nov 2010.
• Core Standards: This is the website for the Core Standards, a set of recommended standards in English Language and Mathematics for K-12 education introduced in 2010. These standards have been adopted by over forty US states and territories.
• NCTM Standards: This is the website for the National Council of Teachers in Mathematics Principles and Standards for School Mathematics, i.e. "NCTM Standards." These are a set of recommended standards for what students should learn in K-12 schools, and the latest revision of them took place in 2000. They have been very influential (and divisive) over the past 20 years.
• Mathematical Education of Teachers This is a website for the book "The Mathematical Education of Teachers," i.e. MET, produced by the AMS/MAA/CBMS. You can download most of it from this website for free. This is a set of recommendations for how future mathematics teachers should be educated, and it came out in 2001. You can read two reviews of MET in the October 2001 issue of the AMS notices (free online as always at www.ams.org).
• Website of Hung-Hsi Wu, a professor of mathematics at Univ. of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively regarding mathematics education, and has posted a large number of insightful articles and essays on his page.