The first calculus course in the province of Quebec (Canada) is taught in the first year of college (17-18 year-old students) before university. Statistics show that this course is the most difficult one for students at the collegial level and that it prompts many to drop out of school. The literature has highlighted the cognitive problems…

In Tunisia, calculus is a fundamental component of mathematics curriculum in high school and a major requirement at the advanced level in the mathematics bachelor's degree and in engineering. Yet, paving the way for a passage between high school calculus and university calculus remains a challenge for both mathematics education researchers and…

In online STEM courses, self-regulated learning (SRL) serves a critical role in academic success because students are required to monitor and regulate their learning processes. Yet, relatively little research has investigated which and to what extent do SRL strategies contribute to students' online learning experiences. In this paper, with a lens…

Learning centers offer academic resources to postsecondary students to aid in their success. Despite deep work examining the efficiency of these learning centers, the field still does not know enough about students' experiences with these learning centers' resources. By understanding the mechanisms and experiences of students as they learn about,…

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…

Greater flexibility with procedures is known to be associated with greater conceptual knowledge of mathematics and vice versa. In parallel, a student's emotional relationship to mathematics -- i.e. their 'affect' -- is known to influence how they learn and perform in mathematics. For example, a confident student may engage more fully with…

Virtual learning environments give students more autonomy over their learning than traditional face-to-face classes and require that students adapt the ways they consume and assimilate new information. One theory of this process is self-regulated learning, which is illustrated in Efklides' Metacognitive and Affective model of Self-Regulated…

In our modern world, we are inundated and grapple with data daily. As mathematicians, we are often more comfortable discussing the behavior of functions presented analytically, in contrast with the data-driven or tabular presentations of functions ubiquitous in our culture. This paper introduces an entry-level course, Mathematical Modeling and…

Nationwide, many students fail to complete the key mathematics courses that are required for most STEM majors, including Precalculus. This paper describes the rationale, implementation, and impact of the redesign of Precalculus at one regional west coast institution. Prior to the redesign, pass rates in Precalculus were modest (75.8% of all…

Adolescent and children's concepts of multiplication and fractions have been linked to differences in the number of levels of units they coordinate. In this paper, we discuss relationships between adult students' conceptual structures for coordinating units and their pre-calculus understandings. We conducted interviews and calculus readiness…

Prior research showed a gender effect on spatial ability, math anxiety, and math achievement. Lacking, however, is a comprehensive study that tested the mediation effects of spatial ability and math anxiety between gender and math achievement in a sequential mediation model. To fill this gap, this pilot study tested two mediation relationships,…

This article reports on a reconceptualization of the Precalculus course experience at Florida International University. We discuss the details of the redesign process--unified within a faculty learning community (FLC) model--along with a broader change in the course sequence leading up to Calculus. We provide data, including the comparison between…

The ability to solve mathematical problems has been an interesting research topic for several decades. Intuition is considered a part of higher-level thinking that can help improve mathematical problem-solving abilities. Although many studies have been conducted on mathematical problem-solving, research on intuition as a bridge in mathematical…

This paper sets forth a construct that describes how many undergraduate students understand mathematical terms to refer to mathematical objects, namely that they only refer to those objects that satisfy the term. I call this students' pronominal sense of reference (PSR) because it means they treat terms as pronouns that point to objects, like…

Recently, Wilmer III and Costa introduced a method into the mathematics education research literature which they employed to construct solutions to certain classes of ordinary differential equations. In this article, we build on their ideas in the following ways. We establish a link between their approach and the method of successive…