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Essay to students about the fallacy of fixed math ability

Author(s): Jeremy M Wojdak

Radford University

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Summary:
Essay written in 2014 for freshmen in an intro bio course on the fallacy of fixed math ability

Licensed under CC Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 1.0 - published on 03 Jan 2018 doi:10.25334/Q4D10D - cite this

Description

This is a short essay I wrote in 2014 to share with my students, after hearing the inevitable "I'm not good at math." as a reaction to some quantitative topics in class.  I hope that it is not too preachy, but rather points students to think in a different way about math ability.   It was (seemingly) well-received by freshmen in an intro bio course.  Perhaps it could be used to start an in-class discussion about math ability, how to approach one's own academic "weaknesses", and the "growth" mindset....  (more on the growth mindset here: http://www.mindsetworks.com/webnav/whatismindset.aspx )

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