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Reimagining the Introductory Math Curriculum for Life Sciences Students

Erin Sanders O’Leary

Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence, University of Illinois Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607

^‡These three authors contributed equally to this work.

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Hannah Whang Sayson

Center for Educational Assessment, Center for the Advancement of Teaching

^‡These three authors contributed equally to this work.

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Casey Shapiro

Center for Educational Assessment, Center for the Advancement of Teaching

^‡These three authors contributed equally to this work.

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Alan Garfinkel

Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095

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William J. Conley

Department of Mathematics, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095

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Marc Levis-Fitzgerald

Center for Educational Assessment, Center for the Advancement of Teaching

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M. Kevin Eagan

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095

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, and

Blaire Van Valkenburgh

*Address correspondence to: Blaire Van Valkenburgh (E-mail Address: [email protected]).

Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095

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Jennifer Knight, Monitoring Editor

Published Online:30 Nov 2021https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-11-0252

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Abstract

Calculus is typically one of the first college courses encountered by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors. Calculus often presents major challenges affecting STEM student persistence, particularly for students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM. For life sciences majors, calculus courses may not offer content that is relevant to biological systems or connect with students’ interests in biology. We developed a transformative approach to teaching college-level math, using a dynamical systems perspective that focuses first on demonstrating why students need math to understand living systems, followed by providing quantitative and computational skills, including concepts from calculus, that students need to build and analyze mathematical models representing these systems. We found that students who complete these new math courses perform better in subsequent science courses than their counterparts who take traditional calculus courses. We also provide evidence that the new math curriculum positively impacts students’ academic performance, with data that show narrowing of the achievement gap, based on students’ math grades, between student subgroups in the new math courses. Moreover, our results indicate that students’ interest in the concepts and skills critical to the quantitative preparation of 21st-century life sciences majors increases after completing the new contextualized math curriculum.

Vol. 20, No. 4

December 01, 2021

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History

Submitted: 4 November 2020

Revised: 27 August 2021

Accepted: 31 August 2021

Information

© 2021 E. S. O’Leary, H. W. Sayson, C. Shapiro, et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2021 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

This research study was supported, in part, by a grant to the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program (DUE award no. 1432804). Additional support was provided by UCLA’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching Instructional Improvement Program (IIP grant no. 13-29) and UCLA’s Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences (CEILS). We thank the Life Sciences (LS) Division for providing funding for the implementation of the new math curriculum. Special thanks to LS Dean V. Sork, whose leadership and vision for transforming the first-year academic experiences of all life sciences majors created an opportunity for ambitious course reform that otherwise would not have been possible. Considerable thanks to LS department chair F. Laski for providing the administrative home for the courses. We thank J. Shevtsov, E. Deeds, J. Keranen, S. Venugopal, K. McCully, and all other instructors, for their contributions to the development and teaching of the new math curriculum. We also thank our collaborator T. Hasson for her advice and leadership in modifying the STEM student retention program, PEERS, to align with and support students enrolling in the new math courses. Finally, we thank S. Shutta-Morgan for assisting with data entry; J. Fregoso for helping with early versions of figures and tables; and science course instructors D. Pires, J. Casey, J. Samani, and S. Shaked for their critical interrogation of topics and concepts in the math courses.

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