Students experience great social and academic challenges during their first semester of college and for many, the completion of required mathematics courses is one of those challenges. This study investigated the relationship of first-time college freshmen's mathematics course enrollment, gender, and high school mathematics course experience to…

What is mathematics? What does it mean to be a mathematician? What should students understand about the nature of mathematical knowledge and inquiry? Research in the field of mathematics education has found that students often have naive views about the nature of mathematics. Some believe that mathematics is a body of unchanging knowledge, a…

Student success inequities in online gateway math courses exacerbate the problematic trend that too few marginalized, community college students complete a degree, especially during the time of COVID-19 in which this study was situated. This critical participatory action research study examined the experiences and perspectives of the on-the-ground…

Since the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board launched their ambitious strategic plan entitled "60x30TX," higher education institutions must test and correctly place undergraduates in appropriate developmental or college-level courses based on undergraduates' academic ability. However, students who are required to take…

Remedial education, also known as developmental education, college preparation courses, or skills courses, are usually offered by two-year and four-year colleges and universities in the United States to students deemed underprepared for college-level coursework. In sharp contrast with the prevalent offering of remedial courses in post-secondary…

The Florida Legislature passed a bill that changed the placement methods for some incoming students to the Florida State College System in 2013. This analysis of state policy looks at Senate Bill 1720 as the treatment in an interrupted time-series trend study at one state college in Florida. This research attempts to answer three questions: (1)…

The problem was that testing instructions were normally presented as gains were more advantageous for promotion-oriented individuals, while testing instructions presented as losses were more advantageous for prevention-oriented. The purpose of this quantitative comparative study was to compare the performance on a measure of achievement for black…

My dissertation "Choice and Inequality in Higher Education" describes the way seemingly benign choices predict course and campus experiences and can perpetuate inequality. I draw on literatures of capital, habitus, identity development, and gender status beliefs and contribute to literature on stratification and sociology of education. I…

Remedial/developmental and introductory university mathematics courses have a long history of high attrition rates. Recently, university administration and mathematics departments have been considering technological solutions, and one such solution is computer-adaptive-instruction (CAI). In fact, CAI has been touted as a "silver bullet"…

Community colleges across the United States are adopting multiple measures policies that place students into college-level or developmental coursework based on more than one indicator of student ability. Historically, community colleges relied on high-stakes tests for student placement but recent studies have exposed these as unreliable indicators…

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the relationships between student persistence and students' attributes or perceptions of instructional pedagogies, as well as to examine whether the identified relationships are moderated by three different instructional settings. Improving student persistence in science, technology, engineer, and…

In this study, I examined links between College Algebra students' covariational reasoning and their conception of general function notation (y = f(x)). I investigated the following research questions: How might students' conceptions of function impact their conceptions of function notation? How might covariational reasoning related to function…

Faced with meeting the challenges that school districts have for the pass rates set before them by the state many schools have looked for new ways to engage their students and increase competency in the class. Intrinsically motivated students have always been shown to have a higher success rate compared to the students that do not possess this…

Higher education research overlooks the achievement of Asian community college students, possibly due to the stereotypes of Asian students as naturally excelling in academia, perpetuated by the model minority myth. This is concerning, because in California, many of the academic achievements that are used to assess the effectiveness of initiatives,…

Whiteness is present and performed when whites are discussing race and racism. It is also working when race isn't being discussed in STEM college classrooms. As this dissertation shows, white students in college algebra participate in white racial bonding, committing racial microaggressions and what I coin "nanoaggressions" against…