© 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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