Mary Parker
PAR 1163
Fall 1997
Topics in Developmental Mathematics
This is a fairly new course. I was one of the people who developed it to provide an alternative to the Elementary Algebra - Intermediate Algebra sequence for students who needed to go on to a 1500-level college-credit math course. It has a mixture of topics, very much like the TASP test, and is not nearly as focused on algebra as the other PAR sequence of math courses. That is appropriate, since the 1500-level courses are more focused on other mathematical topics besides algebra and the best preparation for them is a more broad-based problem solving course. Mostly students find this kind of thing more fun than the previous math courses they have had. We'll look at how mathematics is used in the world and how to make sense of many of the statements about numbers and percentages that you read in the paper and run across in your work and in daily life.
We'll have a really good time in the course! When I taught the 1-hour version of this course last year, we did some experimenting with geometric figures and blocks to make the geometry formulas more meaningful and students used some of the software in the Parallel Studies Tutoring Lab to do quick and effective reviews of material for the TASP test. They found both the experiments and the work on the TASP-prep software enlightening and not at all tedious.
If you do sign up for this course, send me an email message and tell me a little about yourself in advance. I'd like to get to know people as soon as possible. (Obviously, I won't hear from the people who aren't looking at the Web. But it would be fun to hear from as many of you as possible!)
I look forward to meeting you!
From the Official Course Handout:
Course Purpose: To prepare students for Math 1513, Mathematics Its Spirit and Use, Math 1563, Elementary Statistics, and Math 1583, Technical Mathematics, and to pass the mathematics portion of the TASP test.
Prerequisite: PAR 1153, Prealgebra, or an appropriate score on the ACC Assessment Test.
Textbook: Developmental Mathematics by Bittenger and Beecher
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