(1) Each year, mathematics departments teach 60,000+ future PK-12 teachers (computation). Each day, a high school teacher or middle school teacher works with over 100 students across their class periods on average, and an elementary teacher works with 20 students on average (NCES). The messages that undergraduates take from the math classes can influence millions of PK-12 each year.
(2) Q. How many mathematics faculty are interested in mathematics education? A. An estimate may be given by members of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Members may identify a “primary” interest from among the Mathematics Subject Classification (MSC) system. Members may identify multiple primary interests, or no primary interests. Members may also identify “secondary” interest. The MSC has 63 active codes (distributed across digits 00 to 97). MSC 97 refers to mathematics education. Here is a chart showing the primary interest identifications among AMS members as of November 2023 (Lai, 2024).
(3) Q. How many mathematics departments would claim mathematics education as an area of research conducted by at least one member of their department? A. Consider the set of AMS institutional members. From within those members, consider the set of institutions beginning with the word “University”. Among the 106 “University” members of the AMS that either had mathematics department websites with a list of research areas, or faculty directory pages with research areas, 43% sites (46 of 106) listed mathematics education as a research area, as of November 2023. As a comparison, 65% listed combinatorics or discrete mathematics as an area of interest, 57% listed number theory as an area of interest, and 31% listed mathematical logic as an area of interest. Institutions whose names begin with “University” form a small slice of institutions of higher education with mathematics departments. Nonetheless, this estimate, along with the census ofAMS members’ interests, are evidence for the claim that doing mathematics education in mathematics departments is no more exceptional than doing algebra or mathematical logic (Lai, 2024).
(4) Q. How are institutions doing in terms of graduating students in the mathematical sciences – specifically the proportion of bachelor’s degrees that are math or statistics majors? How big is the demand for calculus in each institution – specifically, what proportion of bachelors degree recipients are likely to have needed at least one semester of calculus to graduate? A. The TPSE group has a great data visualization page to address these questions! https://www.tpsemath.org/dataviz
Yvonne Lai 