Author(s):
In the past few years, educators have witnessed the impact of the pandemic on students’ academic performance. Changes in instructional modalities and lack of in person interactions during their high school years led to challenges in students’ mathematics readiness and level of rigor in their preparation. These factors made it difficult for incoming college freshmen to have a smooth transition and success in their programs of study. At the same time, faculty have been facing barriers due to the widespread disparities in the level of mathematics preparation of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors. As a result, research is needed on ways to prepare high school students for college level success in mathematics. Calculus is a gateway course for college students majoring in STEM fields. The goal of our research is to investigate the help-seeking behaviors of students enrolled in an online precalculus review course (OPRC). Our intervention methodologies have focused on helping underprepared students, including women, first generation college students, and non-native speakers of English to be successful in their college study. In this talk, we will share our research findings on lessons learned during the first two years of the implementation of our three-year NSF study. We will share the iterative process we used to make changes across the study to improve our outreach and recruitment strategies for both the course and the research study based on data collected through focus groups. In addition, we will present quantitative and qualitative evidence of the impact of the intervention.
Coauthors
Dr. Kiran R. Bhutani (PI), bhutani@cua.edu and Dr. Guoyang Liu (Co-PI), liu@cua.edu
