A summer bridge to calculus for students with high school calculus experience

Abstract

The University of Texas — Pan American (UTPA) is a minority serving institution in south Texas. The student population is predominantly made up of students from the local region, which includes two of the poorest counties in Texas. A significant number of high schools in the region offer some form of Calculus course, and in practice we find a number of incoming students with Calculus or Pre-Calculus on their high school transcript but who do not have college credit for these courses, and who are placing into College Algebra via the usual placement mechanisms. These placement mechanisms are largely test based. The goal of this intervention is explore the possibility of improving these students preparation so that they will be successful in a Calculus 1 class in their first semester at UTPA. We have chosen an emporium model course design for the intervention in an effort to make use of student's previous experience as demonstrated by high school course work. In the first cohort we successfully transitioned 16 students to Calculus 1 for the Fall 2014 semester, and 10 of these were successful in that class. This is not a statistically significant better performance in Calculus 1 over the traditional pre-requisite pathway (College Algebra and Pre-Calculus), and in future cohorts we will continue to adjust the course content and support structure.