Professor John Quintanilla invites you to attend the Masters project defense of Damon Gaddis next Monday, July 7th, at 9:30 am in GAB 438. Cookies and coffee will be served in GAB 472 following this event.
"Does having taken Discrete Mathematics benefit students when they later take an introductory proofs course?"
Abstract:
The difficulties that many undergraduate students have when they are first exposed to rigorous mathematical proofs often discourage them from pursuing a major or minor in mathematics. During the Fall of 2013, UNT began offering a course in Discrete Mathematics in the hope that students who take the course will not struggle as much in later proof-based mathematics courses. To help determine whether taking Discrete Mathematics benefits students who later take Real Analysis I, I analyzed the first two in-class exams of students who had taken Discrete Mathematics the previous semester and compared their responses to students in the same Real Analysis I class who had not taken Discrete Mathematics. A qualitative analysis of their responses shows there is no discernible difference between the two groups. Because of the small sample size of this study, it is unknown whether this result generalizes to the entire population.