Background Graduation rates in engineering programs continue to be a concern in higher education. Prior research has documented an association between students' experiences in first‐year mathematics courses and graduation rates, but the influences of the mathematics courses completed and the grades earned are not fully understood. Purpose The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among the first undergraduate mathematics course a student completes, the grade they earn in this course, and the likelihood of graduating with a degree in engineering within six years. Method The study involved 1504 students from five consecutive cohorts of first‐year students enrolled in an engineering degree program at a medium‐sized Midwestern public university. Logistic regression was used to model the interrelationship between course and grade in predicting the relative likelihood of graduation for students enrolled in 16 different mathematics courses. Results Overall, students who take Calculus I or a more advanced mathematics course as their first mathematic course and who are more successful in their first mathematics course are more likely to graduate with a degree in engineering. However, considering grade and course together, some groups of students who are more successful in lower‐level mathematics courses are as likely to graduate as students who are less successful in upper‐level mathematics courses. Conclusions Evidence from this study helps to dispel the myth that beginning with higher‐level mathematics courses is the optimal course‐taking strategy when pursuing an engineering degree. Findings have implications for student advising, curriculum and instruction, high school course‐taking, and broadening participation in engineering.

In this paper, we conduct a secondary analysis of The Institute of Educational Sciences’ (IES) 2011-2012 Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS) data, a self-reported, nationally representative database to examine: (a) the average caseload of students with disabilities and emergent bilingual learners within and across social studies content areas, as well how social studies teachers’ caseloads compare with other content area disciplines and (b) the extent and perceived utility of professional development opportunities social studies teachers receive to support both students with disabilities and emergent bilingual learners.

While researchers, educators, state and national organizations, and policy makers are taking strides to help transform traditional mathematics classrooms into inquiry-based classrooms, they fail to address how to bridge the gap between creating discussions to developing mathematical discourse. One key component for producing inquiry-based classrooms is to have effective discussions (Smith & Stein, 2011). However, to have effective discussions, social norms must be in place that promote active participation from students (Sherin, 2002). Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize educational research on social norms in the mathematics classroom to identify key components teacher educators can focus on to help teachers establish and implement social norms that promote sustainable inquiry-based classrooms. Results suggest social norms must be developed through collaboration of the teacher and students, the classroom environment must be supportive of mathematical discussion, and finally, norms should be (re)negotiated to help change studentsí ways of thinking.

Prior studies have identified the impact beliefs have on mathematics instructors' instructional practice, such as their choice to (or not to) lecture. However, the role of instructional context role in influencing beliefs and instruction has not been thoroughly researched. This paper explores how course context and beliefs could impact mathematics instructors' propensity to lecture by investigating two very different instructional contexts in undergraduate mathematics in the United States: Calculus and Abstract Algebra. The results of our regression analyses were significant in both data sets and, we did find beliefs in each context that predicted the amount of time spent lecturing. For instance, the more calculus instructors believed in the effectiveness of teacher-centered instructional practices, the more likely they were to lecture. Whereas the more abstract algebra instructors believed in their student's capacity to learn the less likely they were to lecture. However, while the regression model for the abstract algebra instructors accounted for 37.8% of the variability in the reported amount of time spent lecturing, the model for Calculus instructors only accounted for 2.7% of the variability. Thus our analyses indicate that there are contextual differences, such as course coordination, student demographics, and the job security of the instructors, that may be mitigating the extent to which beliefs impact instructional practice.