UNIVERSITY
Speaker urges minority participation in math
By Peter Cogswell
Emerald Associate Editor
A noted University of California.
Berkeley mathematician who has helped
to change the way minority students are
educated in mathematics at Berkeley
and across the nation is on campus tu
discuss ways to improve the Universi
ty's math and science programs.
Uri Treisman. director of the Charles
A. Dana Center for Mathematics and
Science Education at Berkeley, spoke
Thursday on increasing minority partic
ipation in mathematics.
“The population is changing."
Treisman said. "Larger and larger popu
lations are minorities and most of these
populations have had nothing to do
with math."
In the mid 1970s the failure rate of
blacks students at Berkeley in math
classes was 00 percent. Treisman said.
Through Treistnan’s work, a decade lat
er it was 4 percent.
Treisman brought down the stagger
ing failure rate by making math appeal
ing to minority students.
"The (math) courses had no life." he
said. "Math has changed the way we
look at the universe, but its not impor
tant if its looked at out of context
"A partial solution is to make fresh
men instruction particularly rich We
have to look at how instruction has to bo
to draw students into an academic
area."
It is important to make a course im
possible for students not to love and to
make it so focused that students base
their lives around it. he said
Treisman became interested in his
field when the f>0 percent failure rate
statistic was first brought to his atten
tion.
"1 became interested in why people
learn and decided to take a look at who
uses calculus." he said
In order to receive funding for his re
search, Treisman had to first find a hy
pothesis and asked members of the fac
ulty and staff for their ideas on why mi
norities made poor math students.
Faculty responses ranged from a moti
vation gap lietween minorities to family
support problems and income problems.
Treisman said that at first he was na
ive enough to believe that one of these
could actually have been one of the
causes for poor minority showings in
mathematics, but his research did not
bear this to he true.
Treisman will speak again today at
1.10 on demographic changes and im
plications for curricular change in room
ItK) of Willamette Hall. The speech is
free and open to the public.
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