Page 426 - qrps

Quantitative Reasoning & Problem Solving
426 © 2014 Pacific Crest
Making it Matter Solving problems in your life
●Create a mathematical model that will predict what day of the week your birthday will fall on for any
given year.
●Construct a mathematical model for the annual salary of an employee. Choose a specific employer
and position that interests you. Include the number of years of previous experience and number of
years with the employer in your initial model.
●Construct a mathematical model for part of your network on a social media site of your choice
(e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) and use it to determine the optimal way of disseminating
important information. Include yourself and ten of your closest associates in the model. Create a
graph of the network and then assign weights to the edges corresponding to the ease with which the
people could communicate (i.e. 1=easily communicates, 10=difficulty communicating). Then find
the minimum spanning tree to be used when “spreading the word”.
Learning to Learn Mathematics Reflecting on and appreciating your learning
1. How is your learning affected by the collective knowledge in an area you are studying?
2. What is the role of abstraction in transferring learning skills?
3. How can understanding the mathematics used in solving the model problem relate to learning skills
in the specific field in which the problem arises?
Assessing Your Performance Assessing your performance as a learner
Review the description of A Successful Performance and assess your own performance against the
standard offered there.
●How and why was your performance SUCCESSFUL?
●How can you IMPROVE your performance, making it more successful? What concrete steps do you
need to take to make each improvement?
Notes