Considering Sense of Belonging in the Mathematics Classroom through Two Lenses

Sense of belonging in the mathematics classroom has been found to impact students’ mathematics learning (Good et al., 2012) and many factors can contribute to sense of belonging. This talk will consider two different projects that attempt to understand sense of belonging. First, I will share about how microaggressions (the intentional or unintentional messages that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages towards a recipient; Sue et al., 2007) present themselves for college mathematics students. Microaggressions that students receive in a math class can impact a students’ learning experience and can often lead to feelings of exclusion (Cawley et al., 2023). Second, I will discuss the ways that students define instructor care and its impact on them. Both framings can help students make sense of their college mathematics experiences while also informing mathematics instructors of ways that students develop (or not) a sense of belonging to the mathematics classroom.

How to choose your own mathematical adventures

What is mathematical research? How does a mathematician find problems to work on? How does one build mathematical collaborations? In this talk, I will share my journey to research mathematics, what it entails, how I have developed new research ideas, and how I have found my place within the mathematical community. Mathematical topics of discussion will include lattice point visibility, parking functions, and a connection between vector partition functions and juggling. No prior mathematical background on these topics is expected nor assumed as we will introduce all of the needed concepts from first principles. All that is needed is the willingness to wonder and ask the question: “what happens if…?”

A Statistical Study of Alternative Representational Systems for the LA City Council

Los Angeles recently convened a Charter Reform Commission to evaluate alternative methods for selecting its leaders. The Commission has recommended ranked-choice voting and an expansion of the City Council, with voters likely to weigh in on these reforms in November.

In this project, we develop a data-driven framework to evaluate proposed reforms, focusing on proportionality, racial representation, and electoral responsiveness. Our approach integrates tools from Statistics and Computer Science, including Bayesian ethnicity imputation, ecological inference, and graph-based sampling algorithms to explore the space of possible districting plans. We presented this work to the Commission in October 2025, advocating for adoption of proportional ranked-choice voting (PRCV) in multimember districts. While the Commission did not adopt this proposal, our findings suggest PRCV offers the strongest gains in minority representation. More broadly, our work highlights how computational and statistical methods can clarify tradeoffs in electoral system design.

This project is joint work with Sarah Cannon, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Claremont McKenna.

Section NExT Lunch Workshop:
Grading as the misuse of mathematics in the measurement of student learning

Grades are everywhere in higher education, but most faculty receive little guidance on how to design a grading system. Instead, we inherit familiar practices, such as points, percentages, partial credit, weighted averages, and letter grades, and rarely have the opportunity to ask what those practices actually communicate about student learning.

In this interactive session, we will take a critical look at the assumptions built into traditional grading. What does an 82% mean? Why do we average learning that happens at different points in time? What happens when we combine measures of mathematical understanding with homework completion, attendance, or other behaviors into a single number?

Using examples from mathematics classrooms, we will explore how seemingly reasonable grading decisions can distort the evidence of what students know and can do. We will then introduce alternative grading, a framework for using grades to communicate student learning. Core principles include clearly defined and measurable learning outcomes, meaningful feedback, opportunities to demonstrate learning over time, and marks that indicate progress. We will examine how these practices can shift students’ attention from accumulating points to learning mathematics, make mistakes and revision a productive part of the learning process, increase student agency and persistence, and create a classroom in which grades better reflect what students know and can do.

Lunch Activities: Mathart Presentations

(pdf of Mathart abstracts and schedule)

This session celebrates MathArt: the rich and evolving intersections of mathematics, art, and pedagogy. Bringing together mathematicians and artists, it features interdisciplinary research, artistic practice, and creative approaches to teaching that explore mathematical ideas through film, dance, music, textile art, and other imaginative forms of creative inquiry. The session highlights how artistic perspectives can reveal unexpected mathematical structures and inspire innovative modes of mathematical expression.

Featured works include Shanna Dobson and Brian Carter’s short film The Sound of Resolution, which renders the experience of working in p-adic geometry as an interior glassy landscape shaped by music, movement, and reflection. Tuyetdong T. Phan-Yamada will present her work in mathematical quilting, revealing how mathematical patterns and structures can take vivid material form through textile art.

Lunch Activities: Math Maker Activities

Join us to play with hands-on math models! This session will feature hands-on math models and an origami demonstration, with the theme of math discovery through playing with physical objects. Activities will include:

• A sampler of Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron's open source, 3D printable geometry, trig and calculus puzzles and visualizations from their Make: Math series of books
• A demo Geometile build of a Los Angeles landmark, and audience-participation table by Yana Mohanty of Imathination LLC
• An origami activity by Jill Dunham of Chapman University