David, thanks for asking Gavin about that.  I should have clarified what I 
suspected to be the case, but I figured folks would have figured I figured 
it was relevant to us :)  however it's true that they are probably looking 
for something a little more detailed than "it went great".  However, even 
quantitative descriptions of how much time students spent on SMC or 
something might be interesting... or if you had a "control group" or 
something.   Even if you end up writing a blog post, I would encourage 
others who (say) might have several sections taught and used an informal 
end-of-term survey to see about attitudes toward computation or whatever to 
submit something.  It doesn't have to be crazy.

Along those lines, I would not call PRIMUS a math ed journal in the strict 
sense you are implying, so in general people shouldn't shy away from 
submitting things to it if they have some experience that others could 
benefit from they could write up in a fair amount of detail with some 
outcomes they can specifically point to.  It very often is a place where 
the better papers from MAA contributed paper sessions in a specific topic 
show up.  

Such as in the special issue I edited on service-learning - not every (or 
any?) paper was highly quantitative in terms of social science/education 
research.  I'm sure [William's wife, name redacted] and Susan of the UTMOST 
grant would kind of laugh at the lack of research methodology in many 
papers.  But that is just the nature of math education at the collegiate 
level; other than with the largest sections at the largest institutions 
(think the massive study of calculus attitudes and outcomes at a number of 
institutions going on right now under quasi-MAA and NSF auspices) or big 
projects, it would be really hard to do "correct" social science 
methodology with what we do.  And certainly with "early-adopter" stuff like 
IBL, certain technology, or ideas for how to start an actuarial program (a 
recent special issue), how would one even do that? I had an interesting 
chat with one of our psychologists about this very thing with something 
(not Sage-related) I did this past semester.  But sharing such ideas is a 
very valuable thing to do, and not everyone can attend 
MathFest/JMM/Sectional Meetings - and certainly they can't attend all talks 
even if they do go :-)  So I view PRIMUS as helping fill that gap.  (Full 
disclosure; I am on the editorial board.)

Also to David - I can't remember if I told you earlier, but the SIMIODE 
project (https://simiode.org/) is led by the long-time editor of PRIMUS, 
Brian Winkel.  That presumably would be friendly to Sage-related 
activities...

- kcrisman

 

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