The Crux: Promoting Success in Calculus II

Abstract

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.