Toh, Pee Choon

Andrews’ singular overpartitions can be enumerated by Ck,i(n), the number of overpartitions of n where only parts congruent to ±i (mod k) may be overlined, and no part is divisible by k. A number of authors have studied congruences satisfied by singular overpartitions. In particular, congruences for C3,1(n) modulo 3, 8, 9, 18, 32, 36, 64, 72 and 144 have been proved. In this article, we prove new congruences modulo 108, 192, 288 and 432 for C3,1(n).

We have applied the ‘practical paradigm’ in teaching problem solving to secondary school students. The key feature of the practical paradigm is the use of a practical worksheet to guide the students’ processes in problem solving. In this paper, we report the diffusion of the practical paradigm to university level courses for prospective and practising teachers. The higher level of mathematics content would demand higher order thinking skills. Learners without a model of problem solving would often revert to solving by referring to many examples of the same ‘type’ of problem. Polya-type problem solving skills framed by the practical worksheet was used as an attempt to elicit more effective problem solving behaviour from them. Preliminary findings show that they were able to use the practical worksheet to model their solution of problems in the courses.

Problem solving task design is not only the design of a non-routine problem to be solved by the students. Our task design also requires a supporting document, the practical worksheet, which would act as a cognitive scaffold for the students in the initial stages of the problem solving process before they can internalize the metacognitive strategies and automate the use of these strategies when faced with a new problem. A further enhancement of the scaffolding that can be provided by the teacher as she facilitates forty or more students working on the practical worksheet is a set of scaffolding cards. In this paper, we describe the cards and the preliminary use of these cards to facilitate problem solving for teachers in a professional development workshop.

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

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).

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.

Using elementary techniques, we prove a general transformation for theta series associated with the quadratic form x2 +ky2. The transformation is then applied to establish several infinite families of identities involving theta series whose Fourier coeffi cients are interlinked.