We aspire to educate students to see and enjoy the beauty and power of the mathematical sciences and to nurture lifelong learners who use mathematical perspectives to engage the world beyond Kenyon.
Learning Goals
Student Learning
- To educate students, both majors and non-majors alike, so that they gain the skills necessary to effectively communicate mathematics, statistics and computer science in both written and oral form.
- To prepare majors and minors for graduate study and careers that use mathematics, statistics and computer science.
- To develop quantitative reasoning skills, improve clarity of thought, increase awareness of the mathematical sciences, and to help students to overcome anxieties and misconceptions about mathematics, statistics and computer science.
- To prepare students to make effective use of technology for problem-solving, computation, analysis, exploration and visualization.
- To establish an inclusive atmosphere, both in and out of the classroom context, that promotes positive student-teacher interactions and interaction among students.
- To help students learn effective study skills, seek help when needed, persist in the face of difficulties, and recognize the value of productive failure.
- To prepare lifelong learners who can read and assimilate complex material independently, recognize connections, formulate precise and relevant questions, and find valid means for resolving those questions.
Faculty and Disciplinary Support
- To encourage all faculty members to use evidence-based pedagogical methods and to experiment with new modes of instruction, course innovations, and the use of appropriate technology in teaching, learning, and applying mathematics, statistics and computer science.
- To engage all faculty members in sustained scholarship, broadly defined to include the discovery of new knowledge, the integration of knowledge, the application of knowledge, and scholarship related to teaching.
- To ensure that the Department provides mathematical, statistical and computational support to other disciplines and to meet the reasonable curricular needs of other departments.
- To support the mathematical sciences communities at the national and regional levels in advancing the goals of the profession as a whole.
Measures
- Senior Capstone paper on a topic of interest chosen by the student. We use a rubric to assess student performance on various primary traits.
- Seniors take the Major Field ETS exam at the end of each fall. Character indicators measure student performance on routine problems, nonroutine problems, and applied problems. The exam also measures knowledge of two broad areas of mathematics: calculus and algebra.
- Additionally, six faculty each year (all but the chair who ultimately writes the report) fills out assessment tables for one of the courses they taught that year. Three faculty focus on departmental learning goals, and the other three focus on college learning goals (many of which intersect with the departmental goals).
Feedback
The department chair collects the data from items 1 and 2 above, and summarizes it for the department. The chair convenes a department meeting in May to discuss the results of items 1 and 2. At this same meeting faculty filling out assessment tables report on their findings and the math faculty as a whole identifies patterns in the data coming from all three items. Based on these patterns, we identify areas in need of improvement and make decisions about ways to improve student learning in the future. The chair then writes a report summarizing the findings of the math faculty, and this report is included in the annual report submitted to the associate provost's office in June.
Updated fall 2019