Welcome to what we hope will be an active page devoted to discussions about teaching a second course in linear algebra and/or matrix theory. We hope that you will contribute your ideas and advice concerning any and all aspects of this important subject - texts, topics to include or exclude in such a course, project ideas, philosophical and pedagogical issues, needs of client disciplines, responses to other submissions, controversies ... PLEASE share your thoughts. This is an opportunity to help improve our image in the mathematics community by providing useful information to departments that need to teach a second course in linear algebra but which have no one on the faculty actively involved in the linear algebra community.

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There are several math education researchers who have done research explicitly related to improving the teaching of linear algebra and understanding how students learn it.  Two of those, with links to their

The following book begins with a long chapter on the history of linear algebra, followed by a number of fundamental papers about teaching this subject.  The history discusses the deep and complicated origins of vector space theory, and how the modern presentation of it was developed in order to clarify and unify those original applications.  This means the presentation in modern texts is beautiful and clean but very abstract, and this makes it difficult for many students.
 

On the Teaching of Linear Algebra

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Jean-Luc Dorier, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.

ISBN-10 : 0792365399

ISBN-13 : 9780792365396

Readers:

On this page we want to supply references and links to worthwhile papers about teaching and learning linear algebra.  Please add to the list if you know good ones.