Dedicated to its motto, that I may serve, Virginia Tech
takes a hands on engaging approach to education, preparing
scholars to be leaders in their fields and communities as
the Commonwealth's most comprehensive university and its leading research institution,
Virginia Tech offers 215 undergraduate and graduate degree programs
to nearly 31,000 students and manages a research portfolio of
nearly $400 million dollars. The mathematics education program at Virginia
Tech is unique in the way that we take advantage
of a presence in two different colleges. We have
faculty in the mathematics department in the College of Science
and we have faculty in the School of Education and
the Department of Teaching and Learning. We take advantage
of that at all levels. At a research level
we take advantage of that in terms of our networks
within the College of Science to departments like Psychology and
Physics and in the School of Education were able to
network to groups like special educators and learning science faculty.
For undergraduate students, we also take advantage of
that. Our undergraduate students, for example, in secondary
mathematics, get undergraduate degree in mathematics, so they're
very strongly prepared in mathematics, just like any other
mathematics major, but they're also they also have the
opportunity to have three early field experiences and then just
one additional year while taking their graduate level education courses
are able to complete a master's degree. Among our
PhD students, we actually have PhD students who are
in the math department getting PhD in Mathematics. Uh
and we have PhD students in the School of Education
uh getting PhD from the Department of Teaching and
Learning, but they're all getting their doing their dissertations
and their research in mathematics education. And we formed
just one community. I really enjoyed my time in
the math department as a master student because I got
to build a really strong foundation of mathematical knowledge,
jumping over to the School of Education. I got
to learn a lot about learning theories in different pedagogies
that help students build up that knowledge of mathematics.
And so for me, it's been nice to
sort of have a foot in each department throughout my
time here because I've been able to have strong mathematical
knowledge and understand how students learn math. One of
the real benefits of the partnership is that I can
really focus in on the content that's specific to mathematics
in my math mathematics department courses. But then when
I go, when I'm taking courses in the School
of Education um which are much less focused specifically on
math, I get exposure to a wide variety of
perspectives in the classroom. One of the things I
think really makes Virginia Tech really stand out is you
do have the opportunity to be in the math department
while researching math education. And that has lots of benefits
I think um you have definitely a closer relationship
with the mathematics that I wanted, but it keeps
you closer to the mathematics community, I would say.
The mathematics education research community at Virginia Tech focuses
centrally on students mathematical thinking and learning. We have
faculty in the math department like Megan Wawro who focuses
on students mathematical development, both at the individual and
the classroom level uh, in linear algebra. And
we have faculty like Jay Wilkins in the School
of Education, who focuses centrally on students quantitative
reasoning and elementary and middle school. And the same
can be said for a PhD students at Virginia Tech,
they have divergent interests, but they centrally focus
on students mathematical thinking and and learning. My current
research deals a lot with undergraduate students here at Virginia
Tech and the relationship between journal writing and a math
course, which is something that's typically really new and
different for a lot of undergraduate math students, so
looking at the relationship between journal writing and their
motivation. And what's exciting about my research is that
throughout my time in the program here, I've gotten
to try lots of different types of research. So,
throughout my experience here at Virginia Tech, my
research has been incredibly varied. Candy Factory is the
first in a sequence that will be at least three
apps um, that's trying to find a way
that we can try to help students build the necessary
ways of thinking that they need to do in order
to understand fractions. So, the Candy Factory app,
basically what it does is it takes students through
a sequence. In each task they're given a
customer order of a candy bar. So something like
this and they're asked basically to make that
custom order from a given whole and what it really
requires of them is to think about fractions in a
fundamentally different way than is usually taught. And so
what we're trying to do with Candy Factory is seeing
if we can transform the way that they're thinking about
fractions. We have a small community that's very engaged
and excited about growing the program and we spend a
lot of time together and we enjoy working together and
traveling together. The students have great opportunities to work
one on one with us in research capacities as well
as teaching capacities within the department or in the county
or going out to schools if that's what they're
interested in as well. Nestled in the Blue Ridge
mountains of southwestern Virginia, Virginia Tech is a world
renowned center for Research and Innovation. If you're looking
for a strong education program grounded in mathematics, let
us welcome you to Virginia Tech.