Challenge
The traditional pathway to calculus, required for all STEM and many Business majors, includes the course, Precalculus (Voigt, 2019). This class is typically taken during a student’s first year in college. STEM students may be placed directly into Precalculus or may be required to take College Algebra as a prerequisite. The two courses together can be viewed as a 2-semester “stretch” pathway to calculus. Precalculus has a high rate of student failure. For example, at Cal State East Bay in 2017, the DFW rate for this class was 29%. Underrepresented minorities had an even higher DFW rate (47%) for the same period. The project team aims to improve pass rates by restructuring the course so that the content is more coherent, increasing the emphasis on the most crucial concepts, and providing professional development to math faculty. As recommended in the MAA Instructional Practices Guide, the team will “design lessons that leverage real-time, student-driven problem solving towards increased conceptual engagement in and ownership of the mathematics” (Abell, 2018). The project team expects this re-structuring will result in higher success rates and a better ability to transfer skills and knowledge to subsequent STEM coursework.
Project Design
The Bay Area Math Collaborative (BAM-C), a group of 5 community colleges and two CSUs, will work together to restructure the traditional (C-ID aligned) Precalculus Course (Math 155), clustering the standard concepts into a Big Ideas structure. “A Big Idea is a statement of an idea that is central to the learning of mathematics, one that links numerous mathematical understandings into a coherent whole” (Charles, 2005). A Big Ideas structure will add coherence and deeper meaning to the central concepts in the course. These central concepts are those that are most important for success in subsequent STEM courses. The restructuring will primarily be done by the members of the BAM-C steering committee composed of one math faculty representative from each partner institution. Each member of the steering committee will also recruit a local work group at their home institution who will review and comment on the work of the steering committee. In the first year of the project, the project team expects to engage approximately 40 math faculty from the participating institutions.
This work will be disseminated beyond the Collaborative Campuses through presentations and/or workshops at two annual conferences. At the conferences the project team expects to reach approximately 80-100 math faculty who will come from both partner institutions and the larger Bay Area math community.
In the second year of the project, the steering committee will engage in a similar process to develop performance tasks to assess student learning under the new structure. These tasks, along with a course guide and onboarding resources, will be developed and shared at the second annual conference. The course guide and onboarding resources will accommodate traditional, online, and hybrid course modalities. In all, the project will impact approximately one section per campus in the first year of the project. These are students who will be enrolled in the precalculus courses taught using the new Big Ideas structure. In the second year, as the new structure and the course guide and onboarding resources are developed and disseminated, along with the professional development activities at the conferences, the number of students impacted could grow to over 2000.
