The Crux: Promoting Success in Calculus II

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

Calculus Reform: Increasing STEM Retention and Post-Requisite Course Success While Closing the Retention Gap for Women and Underrepresented Minority Students

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

Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programs: Multidisciplinary Projects with Homes in Any Discipline

A survey of papers in the ASEE Multidisciplinary Engineering Division over the last three years shows three main areas of emphasis: individual courses; profiles of specific projects; and capstone design courses. However, propagating multidisciplinary education across the vast majority of disciplines offered at educational institutions with varying missions requires models that are independent of the disciplines, programs, and institutions in which they were originally conceived. Further, models that can propagate must be cost effective, scalable, and engage and benefit participating faculty. Since 2015, a consortium of twenty-four institutions has come together around one such model, the Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program. VIP unites undergraduate education and faculty research in a team-based context, with students earning academic credits toward their degrees, and faculty and graduate students benefitting from the design/discovery efforts of their multidisciplinary teams. VIP integrates rich student learning experiences with faculty research, transforming both contexts for undergraduate learning and concepts of faculty research as isolated from undergraduate teaching. It provides a rich, cost-effective, scalable, and sustainable model for multidisciplinary project-based learning. (1) It is rich because students participate multiple years as they progress through their curriculum; (2) It is cost-effective since students earn academic credit instead of stipends; (3) It is scalable because faculty can work with teams of students instead of individual undergraduate research fellows, and typical teams consist of fifteen or more students from different disciplines; (4) It is sustainable because faculty benefit from the research and design efforts of their teams, with teams becoming integral parts of their research. While VIP programs share key elements, approaches and implementations vary by institution. This paper shows how the VIP model works across sixteen different institutions with different missions, sizes, and student profiles. The sixteen institutions represent new and long-established VIP programs, varying levels of research activity, two Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), and two international universities1. Theses sixteen profiles illustrate adaptability of the VIP model across different academic settings

Better Together: Connecting with Other Disciplines Builds Students\u27 Own Skills and Professional Identity

The Summer Research Community (SRC) at Boise State University brings STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) students together with faculty and other students from social sciences and humanities to form an interdisciplinary summer experience. The SRC was founded with impetus from a National Science Foundation grant to create efficiencies among NSF and other STEM education initiatives and to address critical junctures for undergraduate STEM students and faculty