Toh, Pee Choon

This research project is an attempt to realise the ideals of mathematical problem solving, which is at the heart of the Singapore mathematics curriculum in the daily practices of mainstream mathematics classrooms. This work builds on the foundation of M-ProSE (OER 32/08 TTL) to diffuse the findings to the mainstream school curriculum. Our work involves three steps: (1) initialisation of problem solving as an essential part of the mathematics curriculum in a school at the foundational year; (2) infusion of problem solving as an embedded regular curricular and pedagogical practice across all year levels in the school, and (3) diffusion of this innovation from this school to the full range of schools in Singapore. In each of the above steps, we take a complex systems approach and include curriculum, instructional practices, assessment and teacher professional development in our overall design research process. Our current project builds upon the initial foundation of MProSE to scale out (infuse) and scale up (diffuse) the innovation to mainstream schools in Singapore, hence the project is named MInD. With the experience and data collected from MProSE research school, the design needs to be re-adjusted in order for problem solving to be diffused throughout the mainstream schools. The importance and relevance of this research project to schools is readily observed by the schools' responses: To the researchers' pleasant surprise, four mainstream schools readily expressed their commitment to participate in this research as the school leaders see the relevance of this project to their school curriculum. Further, the Principal of MProSE research school expressed his interest to get his school involved for the infusion phase(step (2)) of the research. The research team of MInD consists of the original researchers from MProSE and two more new team members. The entire team consists of expertise from different fields: mathematicians, mathematics educator, educational psychologist, curriculum specialist, senior teacher, a school principal (who is also a mathematician), an expert of change management and leadership studies, a senior MOE curriculum specialist.

This paper presents a re-design of an undergraduate mathematics content course on Introductory Differential Equations for pre-service secondary school mathematics teachers. Based on the science practical paradigm, mathematics practical lessons emphasizing problem-solving processes via the undergraduate content knowledge were embedded within the curriculum delivered through the traditional lecture-tutorial system. The pre-service teachers' performance in six mathematics practical lessons and the mathematics practical test was examined. They were able to respond to the requirements of the mathematics practical to go through the entire process of problem solving and to carry out "Look Back" at their solution: checking the correctness of their solution, offering alternative solutions, and expanding on the given problem. The use of Mathematics Practical has altered the pre-service teachers’ approach in tackling mathematics problems in a positive direction.

The purpose of this paper is to report a part of a calculus research project, about the performance of a group of pre-service mathematics teachers on two tasks on limit and differentiation of the trigonometric sine function in which the unit of angle measurement was in degrees. Most of the pre-service teachers were not cognizant of the unit of angle measurement in the typical differentiation formula, and a number of participants recognized the condition on the unit of angle measurement but did not translate this to the correct procedure for performing differentiation. The result also shows that most of the participants were not able to associate the derivative formula with the process of deriving it from the first principle. Consequently, they did not associate it with finding . In the process of evaluating this limit, the pre-service teachers exhibited further misconceptions about division of a number by zero.

Hirschhorn recently proved a pair of q-series identities that inter-linked the coefficients of two infinite products. We use the theory of modular forms to extend his results from p = 5 to other primes and provide other examples of infinite products sharing similar properties.

In this paper we describe a problem solving course for first year undergraduate mathematics students who would be future school teachers.

Using known formulas for R(a;b)(n), the number of representations of n as a times a square plus b times a square, we prove 21 conjectured formulas of Melham on the number of representations of n as sums of triangular, pentagonal and heptagonal numbers. We also demonstrate how our technique can be used to prove the other 277 conjectured formulas of Melham concerning representations by other gurate numbers.

Stanley introduced a partition statistic srank(π)=O(π)−O(π′), where O(π) denote the number of odd parts of the partition π, and π′ is the conjugate of π. Let pi(n) denote the number of partitions of n with srank ≡i(mod4). Andrews proved the following refinement of Ramanujan’s partition congruence modulo 5: p0(5n+4)≡p2(5n+4)≡0(mod5). In this paper, we consider an analogous partition statistic lrank(π)=O(π)+O(π′). Let p+i(n) denote the number of partitions of n with lrank ≡i(mod4). We will establish the generating functions of p+0(n) and p+2(n) and show that they satisfy similar properties to pi(n). We also utilize a pair of interesting q-series identities to obtain a direct proof of the congruences p+0(5n+4)≡p+2(5n+4)≡0(mod5).