By Lesley LeRoux, TLS freelance writer

While some might call a lesson in mathematics boring, others see it as a performance, capable of engaging an audience of undergraduates as if they were watching an engrossing film.

Such is one of the discoveries from 杏吧原创 linguistics professors Natasha Artemeva and Janna Fox鈥檚 research on how mathematics is taught in undergraduate classes around the world.

The goal of the study, which began in 2007, is to inform requests to change mathematics teachings at the elementary and secondary school levels to better prepare students for university.

鈥淲e think there鈥檚 such a drastic difference between how mathematics is taught in schools and how it is taught in universities. For students, it鈥檚 simply like walking into a course that鈥檚 taught in a foreign language they don鈥檛 know,鈥� Artemeva says. 鈥淭his is too bad, because university mathematics is taught to train students, to make them into apprentices in the mathematical discipline, and apparently what schools do is something different.鈥�

The researchers used video cameras to record mathematics lectures after finding that instruction in the discipline is highly visual. Fox says they took a multi-modal approach, taking into account textual, auditory, and expressional cues, such as movement and gesture.

What they found was that mathematics was taught in strikingly the same way wherever they went, regardless of language, country, culture, or whether instructors were teaching in their first or second language.

Artemeva says she and Fox coined the term 鈥榖oard choreography鈥� in their study to describe how instructors write on the board in real-time and simultaneously explain what was happening on the board.

鈥淧rofessors even think in advance what they鈥檙e going to write on which part of the board, and what they鈥檙e going to erase and what they鈥檙e going to keep because it will become important later in the lecture,鈥� Artemeva says.

These discoveries are significant for the next phase of their research, when they explore how different lecture formats affect students, whether it鈥檚 a face-to-face class, a video-recorded lecture, an online course, or a discussion group.

Fox says this further research is important to help students who are not mathematicians succeed in mathematics courses that are taken as electives.

鈥淔or a long time, we鈥檝e needed to understand what makes it work for students in those classes and how we can make it function better to support greater academic success,鈥� Fox says. 鈥淪o it鈥檚 very rewarding to be working in an area where you might be able to do some good.鈥�