Constructing “Calculus Readiness”: Struggling for Legitimacy in a Diversity-Promoting Undergraduate Engineering Program

Abstract

Kevin O'Connor is assistant professor of educational psychology. His scholarship focuses on human action, communication, and learning as socioculturally organized phenomena. One major strand of research has explored the varied trajectories taken by students as they attempt to enter professional disciplines such as engineering, and focuses on the dilemmas encountered by students as they move through these institutionalized trajectories. Another strand of research has explored community organizing efforts that aim to construct new trajectories into valued futures for youth, especially those of nondominant communities.

Mathematical Maturity for Engineering Students

“…Students must pass prerequisite mathematics courses from the calculus sequence to continue into core engineering coursework [10,11,12]. The strictness of this prerequisite chain can particularly hamper students who are already disadvantaged due to disability or lack of access to high school calculus [13]. Students who do not start calculus-ready or fail a course in the calculus sequence may struggle to complete an engineering degree before financial aid runs out.…”

“…These prerequisite mathematics courses often have high failure/withdrawal rates [72,73,74,75], and a failure in one of these courses pushes back a student's graduation by a semester or more. The strictness of this prerequisite chain can particularly hamper female and minority students [71] and students who are already disadvantaged due to disability or lack of access to high school calculus [13]. Students who do not start calculus-ready or fail a course in the calculus sequence may struggle to complete an engineering degree before financial aid runs out.…”

Scaling Up or Scale-making? Examining Sociocultural Factors in a New Model for Engineering Mathematics Education

“…As engineering and math educators have long studied the factors differentially impacting the success of first-generation and underrepresented minority populations in college calculus courses (Treisman, 1992;Terenzini, Springer, Yaeger, Pascarella, & Nora, 1996;Pascarella, Pierson, Wolniak, & Terenzini, 2004;Ennis, Sullivan, Louie, & Knight, 2013;O'Connor et al, 2015), this work builds on that scholarship and offers a different perspective to analyze how students move through time and space towards undergraduate engineering degrees. Rather than categorizing students as deficient or lacking in mathematical preparation (Louie, Ennis, Tsai, Myers, & Sullivan, 2017), we explore how the WSM pilot / course offers an alternate set of educational scales for students to measure their progress and chart their learning.…”

“…An understanding of MATLAB is a valuable resource in the undergraduate engineering knowledge economy, and teaching MATLAB in Engineering Math creates an alternative point of calibration to the standards established by the traditional math course progression. Feeling ahead or behind one's peers in math knowledge and in math courses has been shown to be additionally consequential for engineering identity development, suggesting that the alternative educational scales represented by Engineering Math provide an alternate pathway for students to develop engineering identity, aside from the default classification of being ahead or behind in calculus (O'Connor et al, 2015).…”

Espoused Faculty Epistemologies for Engineering Mathematics: Towards Defining “Mathematical Maturity” for Engineering

“…Students may have to substantially delay graduation or leave engineering altogether before they have taken even one engineering course. Students with fewer high school educational opportunities, such as students of color, disabled students, or low socioeconomic status students, in particular, are thwarted by the calculus sequence 1 . Many are doomed before they even begin, since the timing of engineering courses assumes that all students are entering college "calculus ready".…”