Initial Publication Date: August 16, 2023

Instructor Guide

Each module provided in The Math You Need, When You Need It has an instructor page dedicated to helping you use these resources! Instructor pages discuss what students should gain from each module, why these topics are challenging for students, and what has not been covered by the module. Additional resources for teaching each quantitative skill and example activities are also available.

Background

This project is building from the highly successful The Math You Need, When You Need It: Math tutorials for students in introductory geoscience (TMYN-Intro). TMYN-Intro developed co-curricular modules that allowed undergraduate students to practice math skills needed in introductory Earth science courses in the context of geoscience applications but outside of primary class time. The project demonstrated that using these modules can increase student math skills, with the greatest improvements coming for students starting with the lowest skills.

Undergraduate majors in the Earth and environmental sciences also often struggle with effectively applying math in Earth science. This project, The Math Your Earth Science Majors Need (TMYN-Majors), is developing similar co-curricular modules to support majors-level students on math concepts relevant to majors-level courses. The math questions and practice problems are drawn from a variety of Earth sciences sub-disciplines, so students have the opportunity to use math within the scientific context on a range of applications. Math classes taken in math departments, while valuable, often fail to give students practice using math in their own subject area and students are often not able to effectively transfer the skills themselves.