Written by Chris Arney, Vice President
The College of Saint Rose, Albany, NY
(This review appeared in Mathematics and Computer Education, vol 38, no. 1, Winter 2004)
I consider teaching and learning college algebra big challenges for the teacher and student, and last semester, I decided to try a reformed approach to the subject. I used Don Small's textbook, which has as its philosophy to educate students for the future. The textbook tries to help students become exploratory learners by having them perform queries (just-in-time explorations included within the text's chapters) and projects (data-driven applications within the text's exercises). I chose this book because I liked Small's list of goals, including improving communication skills, developing teamwork skills, enhancing technology skills, empowering modeling, and building confidence. I think the text helped my students in all these areas.
Don Small is a master at presenting fun and challenging problems. He has included applied problems in sections called "Fun Projects," which require student teams to research, model, solve, and write. Most of these problems start with data that the students are required to turn into useful information.
The book's content is divided into three chapters --- data and variables, functions, and modeling. Small encourages the use of technology (mostly a graphing calculator) to help students solve messy problems and the use of graphical analysis in their problem-solving and analysis. These technology skills were a challenge for my students and for me, but once we became used to our calculators and their capabilities, we made real progress on these skills.
In case you think this book is much different from others with the "College Algebra" title, I will list some of the algebraic and arithmetic skills it contains. Some of the classic techniques covered are: percentage, fractions, radian measure, inequalities, graphing, transformations, function evaluations, factoring, iteration, polynomials, logarithmic and exponential functions, trigonometric functions, parametric functions, and logistic functions.
Having used this textbook, I would say that college algebra continues to be challenging. However, I believe that Small's text helped my students achieve some of the book's goals and gave them a taste of exploratory learning, inquiry, and modeling. I recommend trying this book.