Boise State University (BSU) implemented an across-the-board reform of calculus instruction during the 2014 calendar year. The details of the reform, described elsewhere (Bullock, 2015), (Bullock 2016), involve both pedagogical and curricular reform. Gains from the project have included a jump in Calculus I pass rate, greater student engagement, greater instructor satisfaction, a shift toward active learning pedagogies, and the emergence of a strong collaborative teaching community. This paper examines the effects of the reform on student retention. Since the curricular reform involved pruning some content and altering course outcomes, which could conceivably have negative downstream impacts, we report on student success in post-requisite mathematics and engineering coursework. To explore the effects of the Calculus reform on retention we focused on whether or not students are retained at the university immediately subsequent to the year in which they encounter Calculus I. We divided 3002 student records into two groups: those who encountered the new version of Calculus and those who had the traditional experience. We then compared retention rates for the two groups. We found that the new Calculus course improved retention (relative to the old) by 3.4 percentage points; a modest, but statistically significant (p = 0.020) result. University retention rates for women, under-represented minorities (URM), and Pell-eligible students were also computed. All three subgroups showed gains, with URM leading with 6.3 percentage points of improved retention (p = 0.107) We then considered retention within STEM as a measure of how the Calculus reform influenced students. For the same groups of students, we computed the rate at which STEM majors were retained in STEM. Once again we found a modest overall gain of 3.3 percentage points (p = .078). We found strong effects on women and underrepresented minorities (URM). The new Calculus course improved retention for both of these groups by more than 9 percentage points, a large effect. At this university, under the old Calculus, women used to lag men in STEM retention by about 8 percentage points. After the Calculus reform this gap nearly vanished, shrinking to 0.5 percentage points. Under the old Calculus, STEM retention of URM students used to lag that of non-URM. After the Calculus reform the gap flipped, so that underrepresented minority students are now retained in STEM at higher rates than non-URM. As a final result we examined student success in courses that typically follow Calculus I. Here the metric is pass rate, and we compared pass rates between the students who took the new Calculus against those who took the old. For additional comparison we also included students who transferred into post-Calculus course work. Once again the reformed Calculus course led to better results.
conditions that best facilitate student success as well as the use of SoTL strategies to advance the efforts of scientist-educators. He has over 300 professional presentations at conferences and published over 25 books/book chapters, and has published over 75 professional articles in scholarly, peer-reviewed journals. He has worked with over 300 undergraduate research assistants and taught over 13,000 students in 23 years at Boise State.
In the 2013-14 school year, Boise State University (BSU) launched a major overhaul of Calculus I. The details of the reform, described elsewhere, involved both pedagogical and curricular changes. In subsequent years, we developed several assessment tools to measure the effects of the project on students' grades and retention. The toolkit includes: (1) pass rate and GPA in Calculus I, (2) longitudinal analysis of pass rates and GPA in subsequent courses, (3) impact of Calculus I on retention in STEM and retention at BSU, (4) all of the above comparing students in reformed Calculus vs traditional Calculus, (5) all of the above for underrepresented minorities, women, or other demographic subsets. While these tools were originally developed to study the Calculus I project, they are available for studying the effects of other courses on student academic performance and retention. In this paper, we briefly describe a rebuild of Calculus II, overhauled in the 2015-16 school year following the same general plan as was used for Calculus I. We then present the results of applying the full toolkit to the new Calculus II course. Pass rate and GPA improvements in Calculus II were evident immediately after scale up in the spring of 2016. Sufficient time has now passed so that we can apply the full set of assessment tools built for Calculus I to measure the effectiveness of the Calculus II transformation on academic performance in post-requisite coursework and on student retention in STEM.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.