Women continue to be underrepresented in undergraduate STEM majors. Prior studies identify women's sense of belonging, or the extent to which one feels like an accepted member of an academic community, as a key contributor to their decisions to stick with or leave their STEM majors. Women's social connectedness and perceived competence have been…

Math anxiety negatively affects student learning and academic performance. Students with high math anxiety exhibit physical, mental, and emotional symptoms. As a result, they tend to avoid mathematics and mathematics-related situations, perform poorly, and exhibit deficiencies in working memory. Research studies have shown that inquiry-based…

This research study examined inclusive teaching practices, class policies, and course structures in active learning Calculus classes. Analyzing interview data, along with focus group discussions and classroom observations, obtained from 23 students and 4 instructors, themes were extracted through open-coding methodology, employing scholarly…

Research suggests learning assistant (LA) programs can be a change lever to support the institutionalization of active learning in postsecondary education. Some research suggests LAs offer unique benefits for STEM courses, independent from other change levers, but more research needs to be done to understand how LAs support active learning…

In this dissertation I explore instructors' work with instructional tasks as they plan to introduce various representations of derivatives. Drawing on the notion of "framing" from sociology, I adopt a situative lens to study calculus instructors' planning of instructional tasks. I rely on Herbst and Chazan's (2012) notion of…

Despite the standardization of calculus education as a Calculus and Analytic Geometry course after the 1950s, curriculum updates have been slow to penetrate the undergraduate mathematics classroom practice, taking decades to manifest. Common struggles with the teaching and learning of calculus, such as relying on a procedural understanding of…

"Vicarious learning" research is a burgeoning area of inquiry, which examines the learning of students who observe and are engaged with video- or audio-taped presentations of other people engaged in learning (Chi et al., 2008). In such studies, the students or "vicarious learners" (VLs) are positioned as indirect participants…

"Vicarious learning" research is a burgeoning area of inquiry, which examines the learning of students who observe and are engaged with video- or audio-taped presentations of other people engaged in learning (Chi et al., 2008). In such studies, the students or "vicarious learners" (VLs) are positioned as indirect participants…

Many students are passively engaged in mathematics content across the United States because they are in classrooms that use traditional instruction methods (i.e. lecture and guided practice). Calculus is a struggle for students because of the critical thinking, conceptual understanding, and problem solving required. Active learning has been shown…

Across the nation, there is increasing national interest in improving the way mathematics departments prepare their graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) because of their integral role in teaching lower division mathematics courses, particularly within the Calculus sequence (Speer, Deshler, & Ellis, 2017). While there have been several studies…

This study explored student agency in an active-learning business calculus course. The lecture-style instructional practices typically used in this course at this institution allow few opportunities for students to interact with their peers, interface with the instructor one-on-one, or do mathematics during class time. Additionally, this course…