Mike Egan

Assistant Professor

Education Department

My current research focus involves the Longfellow Kindergarten Number Sense Project, a collaborative effort with my department colleague Randy Hengst, Longfellow kindergarten teachers Vicki Peterson and Berni Carmack, and several undergraduate research assistants drawn from my EDUC 364 course.  I have also continued to engage with other mathematics educators on a project begun prior to my arrival at Augustana, the NSF-funded “Fostering Geometric Thinking in the Middle Grades.”  More details about each of these projects, and links to publications and other documents connected to them, are provided below.

Research suggests that numerical competencies developed before the 1st grade are better predictors of subsequent mathematical achievement than other commonly used early childhood assessments such as tests of memory or intelligence quotient.  Responding to this important finding in the literature, Randy Hengst and I have developed an action research project designed to simultaneously bolster kindergarteners’ “number sense” at Longfellow and improve the quality of a teacher preparation course at Augustana.

Publications and other documentation about this work include:

· A front page article in the Oct. 26, 2009 Dispatch/Argus

· A paper published in the proceedings of the 2009 Association for the Advancement of Computers in Education (AACE) E-Learn conference

· A conference presentation at the 2009 AACE E-Learn Conference in Vancouver, Canada

· A conference presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Peoria, IL

· An Augustana College Presidential Research Fellowship Award conferred in spring 2009

· An Augustana College New Faculty Research Award conferred in fall 2009

From 2006-2008 I was a member of the Fostering Geometric Thinking (FGT) development team at Education Development Center, Inc., in Newton, MA.  FGT was a project funded by the National Science Foundation intended to develop a framework for promoting productive geometric teaching and learning at the middle school level.  Since arriving at Augustana in fall 2008, I have continued to engage the professional mathematics education community with ideas drawn from the FGT project.  My FGT work since the fall of 2008 has included:

· A co-authored chapter published in the peer-reviewed Understanding Geometry for a Changing World: The Seventy-first Yearbook of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (© 2009, NCTM)

· An invitation from the Illinois Council of Teachers of Mathematics (ICTM) to present a session at the 2009 ICTM Conference geared toward middle school mathematics teachers

· An invitation from the ICTM to present a second session at the 2009 ICTM conference geared toward teacher educators

Longfellow Kindergarten Number Sense Project

Fostering Geometric Thinking in the Middle Grades

Research (2009)

Working with a preschool child during summer field-testing of software designed for the Number Sense project.

Administering an assessment of counting skills to a child a few weeks before she began kindergarten.

A chapter I co-authored appeared in the 2009 Yearbook of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.