According to Anthony Tomba (2021), scholars have highlighted the importance of incorporating diverse social and cultural contexts into instruction. Faculty often do not have access to contextualized precalculus lessons with instructor’s notes that they perceive to be relevant and important to both their students’ interests and future careers. The focus of this project is to develop an instructor booklet of precalculus and STEM college algebra lessons that contain a contextualized opening and collaborative, active learning lessons. This collection of instructor resources will be accessible to faculty throughout the institution and the state as open educational resources and via Canvas. Additionally, a key objective is to collaborate with other STEM disciplines to bring examples from their areas. During the two-year grant period, this project team will create a set of lessons, pilot them, and assess them. This team will facilitate this through an ongoing community of practice for instructors using the lessons developed to discuss and revise the content of the lessons. These lessons will increase students’ interest and engagement in the course and subsequent studies and result in improved student performance and a reduction in equity gaps on the pathway to calculus.

This project aims to minimize the calculus access barrier for STEM students at Citrus College and ameliorate the low and inequitable calculus completion rates for students deemed “not calculus ready.” The overall project goal is to produce stronger and more equitable calculus completion for Citrus College students that currently place into precalculus. This project team will implement a change in placement policies to broaden direct access to calculus for students previously placed (using multiple measures assessment and placement) into precalculus, develop and disseminate the use of a backward classroom design to embed relevant precalculus concepts into calculus instruction and an interactive pedagogy based on 360° whiteboards, and conduct an analysis that compares calculus completion in the corequisite model to calculus completion attained by similar students starting in precalculus and tracks student success in Calculus II or other STEM courses.

This project team at College of the Canyons seeks to overcome barriers for underrepresented populations by building upon and enhancing the successful transitions from Pre-Calculus to Calculus I while introducing culturally-sound strategies to overcome ethnic and gender disparities. Overall project goals include addressing disparities in student success rates and enrollment in Pre-Calculus and Calculus I courses by ethnicity and gender by examining pathway transitions and exploring new instructional and student support strategies, and providing Math faculty with professional development and a community of practice (CoP) to support the exploration and integration of equity-minded best practices and strategies to increase student engagement and a “sense of belonging.” The project will explore new methods to deliver Pre-Calculus coursework for STEM students, which includes examining the feasibility of creating other “discipline-focused calculus” courses designed for specific STEM majors.

This team plans to redesign its first-year physics courses to incorporate calculus in the syllabus to promote calculus teaching and learning within the context of physics. Students in this program will also learn Python programming, and through coding, will experience the predictive power of calculus by solving and exploring practical problems in science and engineering. By teaching students elementary coding and programming in Python, this team hopes that their students will develop proficiency in logical thinking, and be able to quantify problems and visualize solutions to prepare them to enter STEM fields.

This team at Santa Ana College seeks to provide an enhanced and more equitable learning experience in calculus, in addition to a smoother STEM pathway that reduces the financial burden for students from all backgrounds and disciplines. Their work focuses on integrating interactive Online Educational Resources (OER) within restructured calculus courses that leverage the support of embedded peer tutors to provide a network of support and a variety of practical resources that incorporate visual aids and perspectives from individuals from disproportionately impacted communities.

The C3 team is working to engender a teaching and learning community to support women and minoritized student success in STEM, particularly in Calculus. The overarching goal of this project is to help Grand Challenge cohort teams re-conceptualize the role of, and approach to, calculus in a student’s first year introductory STEM experience, as well as to support new, innovative ways to teach calculus, or reimagine the role of calculus in STEM majors where calculus is a prerequisite.

This project will engage faculty to develop and expand the Program Pathways Mapper and develop and expand transfer tools and paths for students in critical STEM disciplines.

This project will build upon their proficiency-based learning curriculum and develop concept mapping navigation tools for faculty and students to track progress in student learning and mastery.

This project designs materials to help both instructors and students to see science as an expansive and inclusive set of practices. It explicitly defines scientific competence as participation in these practices.

The Equitable Math Assessment Project will promote the adoption of the Calculus Big Ideas framework, create assessment resources which align with the re-organized content and activities for the BAM-C Course Guide, and develop a checklist tool for teachers to reflect on daily teaching practices.