Escape the Math Room is a fun, interactive, sequence of puzzles designed to encourage mathematical collaboration, team work, and ingenuity. Using advanced mathematical topics in an accessible way, Escape the Math Room appropriately challenges students ranging from high school to advanced undergraduate. The activity can be adjusted by adding or…

Coming from the commognitive standpoint, we consider proof-based mathematics as a distinct discourse, the transition to which requires special rules for endorsement and rejection of mathematical statements. In this study, we investigate newcomers' learning of these rules when being taught them explicitly. Our data come from academically motivated…

Statistics & data science are growing, rapidly evolving, and increasingly important for an informed citizenry in a data-saturated world. In this dissertation, I address two central questions: (1) who is taking statistics? and (2) what are statistics courses teaching? I estimate that 920,000 US students take statistics in high school each year,…

This keynote address explores the history and role of college math requirements with a focus on ensuring math courses serve to expand students' horizons, rather than serve as gatekeepers. It discusses the advent of general education math courses, which brought more students into math departments, which ultimately contributed to broadening the…

The University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program (UMTYMP) is a selective, five-year accelerated mathematics program for students in grades 6-12. During the program, students take college mathematics courses on University of Minnesota campuses, starting with algebra and continuing through logic and proofs, linear algebra, and…

Annually, 40% to 60% of students who graduate high school and enroll in higher education do not exhibit the skills necessary to succeed in college-level work and will need remediation in mathematics or English (Jimenez et al., 2016). Successfully graduating from high school does not guarantee academic preparedness for college. To understand why a…

Assembly Bill 1705 (AB 1705) seeks to strengthen students' completion of the first STEM Calculus course for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) programs across the California Community Colleges. The law sets new standards for students' placement and first math enrollment to ensure STEM students begin in transfer-level coursework that…

This technical appendix accompanies the report, "Preparatory Pathways and STEM Calculus Completion: Implications of the AB 1705 Standards." The appendices contain a full methods section and multivariate analyses that augment the descriptive analyses presented in the report. Together, these analyses examined a cohort of more than 37,000…

Across the nation, community colleges have expanded dual enrollment programs to increase college enrollment and completion, particularly among historically underserved populations. The California Community College system--the largest system in the nation--is no different and recently expanded its dual enrollment programming to include College and…