Mathematics and Statistics
Mathematics and Statistics
Associate Professor (on sabbatical 2023-2024)
Mathematics and Statistics
Abbotsford campus, T103
Phone: 604-504-7441 ext. 4867
email KseniyaKseniya Garaschuk has been active in numerous committees for the Canadian Mathematical Society and UFV. She continuously participates in local and national conferences, organizes events, and actively publishes. Her teaching receives excellent feedback from her students and her peers. Kseniya coordinates the Fraser Valley Math Education Sq'ep, a community-building event that explores Indigenous ways of learning and knowing with connections to mathematics. She is the editor-in-chief for Crux Mathematicorum, an open-access journal for math enrichment, and a contributing editor for CMS Notes.
In 2021 the Canadian Mathematical Society gave Kseniya their Graham Wright Award for Distinguished Service, and named her as a fellow of the society.
BSc Simon Fraser University
MSc Simon Fraser University
PhD University of Victoria
Canadian Mathematical Society
I teach people first. I teach content second.
I like teaching math courses with applications to life sciences because it highlights connections between mathematics and other fields, such as biology, chemistry, ecology, epidemiology and many others. I am a pure mathematician by training, so these courses also take me a bit out of my comfort zone and challenge me to think more broadly, to focus on problem solving skills rather than course-specific techniques, to emphasize interpretations over calculations. I also obviously enjoy teaching discrete math courses as that is my own research background and it is the branch of mathematics that I always found most beautiful.
I am an applied math education researcher. I enjoy working in a “living lab”: my research involves students and revolves around them. My two main research interests are:
• student transition from high school to university, specifically their academic readiness;
• the effectiveness of classroom practices, particularly active learning or group activities.
My two big current projects involve studying student calculus readiness and its effects on calculus performance as well as examining student learning gains on collaborative exams.
K. Garaschuk (2022), Learning benefits of collaborative exams, Journal for Research and Practice in College Teaching, 7(1), p. 42--55. https://journals.uc.edu/index.php/jrpct/article/view/4699
K. Garaschuk, Bringing "real world" into calculus, Proceedings of the 45th Annual meeting of Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group, https://www.cmesg.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/CMESG-2021.pdf
K. Garaschuk, E. Cytrynbaum (2018), Feasibility and effectiveness of group exams in mathematics courses, Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies, 29:10, p. 1061-1079, https://doi.org/10.1080/10511970.2018.1472684
K. Garaschuk, Accessing and addressing student calculus readiness, Vector (the official journal of British Columbia Association of Math Teachers), 61/2 (2018), p. 36–39
K. Garaschuk, Predicting failure in first-term calculus courses, UBC cIRcle, June 2017,https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0357414
K. Garaschuk, Group exams: the good, the bad and the students' comments, CMS Notes, 49 (2017), p. 10--12, https://notes.math.ca/archives/Notesv49n1.pdf
P. Dukes, K. Garaschuk, Threefold Triple Systems with Nonsingular $N_2$}, Discrete Mathematics, Volume 338 (2015), Issue 6, p. 835--838
K. Garaschuk, P. Lisonek, On Ternary Kloosterman Sums modulo 12, Finite Fields and Their Applications 14 (2008), no. 4, p. 1083--1090
K. Garaschuk, P. Lisonek, On Kloosterman Sums Divisible by 3, Designs, Codes and Cryptography 49 (2008), no. 1-3, p. 347--357
I participate in a variety of outreach events. In the past, I’ve founded and run numerous Math Camps at University of Victoria and University of British Columbia. I currently participate in the organization of Science Rocks!