Research and data show that developmental education has been a stumbling block for the majority of community college students in pursuing their higher education degree. Students can spend several semesters to complete developmental math requirements in order to take a first college-level credit-bearing math course for their degree. Many colleges…

The purpose of this study was to design, develop, and test the effects of digital game-based learning on undergraduate students' learning motivation, mathematics achievement, and learning retention in a college algebra course. Digital games utilize interactive digital media that offer rules-based challenges and react to the individual's choices.…

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of co-requisite education on gateway mathematics, predicated on the Reinforced Instruction for Student Excellence (RISE) model, at a large urban community college (LUCC) in North Carolina. The research study explored the success rates in gateway mathematics courses in relation to the…

We show that the total distance traveled by an under-damped oscillating spring mass system with sinusoidal displacement results in a nice, closed-form expression.

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…

This study examined the extent to which college algebra instructors employ pedagogical practices previously found to assist students master difficult STEM content material and address their own previous math deficits. Faculty classroom behaviors were assessed with a modified version of the Generalized Observation and Reflection Platform (GORP).…

This study conducted at the Lebanese American University in spring 2018 reports on an inquiry-oriented differential equations class where the course curriculum falls within the realm of Realistic Mathematics Education. The focus of the study is on some curriculum tasks and how they assist students reinvent successfully key mathematical notions…

We describe the effects of a change in the mathematics placement policy at a large 4-year public university. The change resulted in a sharp reduction of the number of students placed in remedial courses, while the levels of academic preparedness of the students, the course content, and the instruction methods remained the same. This allows us to…

Many tertiary institutions with mathematics programmes offer introduction to proof courses to ease mathematics students' transition from primarily calculation-based courses like Calculus and differential equations to proof-centred courses like real analysis and number theory. However, unlike most tertiary mathematics courses, whose mathematical…

The aim of this study is to analyse undergraduate students' understanding of polar coordinates based on two theories, Action, Process, Object and Schema (APOS) and Onto-Semiotic Approach (OSA). These two theories complement each other and each of them separately has been used in many research to explore students' performance of mathematical…

This research commentary argues for more research that attends to the processes of organizational change in mathematics departments. It outlines both the ways that research on organizational change can benefit scholarship in mathematics departments, and how mathematics education researchers are needed to develop theories of change that are…

For many of my students, Real Analysis I is the first, and only, analysis course they will ever take, and these students tend to be overwhelmed by epsilon-delta proofs. To help them I reordered Real Analysis I to start with an "Analysis Boot Camp" in the first 2 weeks of class, which focuses on working with inequalities, absolute value,…

Homework gives students the opportunity to practice new skills in both familiar and unfamiliar situations, and to develop an understanding of related concepts. Although some of these goals can be easily accomplished in online homework, many systems are less useful for handling open-ended questions. Written homework, on the other hand, takes time…

We consider the use of projects in math courses as a mechanism for promoting coding, communication, and interdisciplinary application of math skills. Final projects play an important role, but we also discuss several alternate types of projects. We describe a model that incorporates projects at all stages across the undergraduate mathematics…