A study was done at a mid-sized public university in the Midwest of the United States. At this university, there are three large classes taught in Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) classrooms: algebra-based introductory physics, calculus-based introductory physics, and introductory statistics.…

Relating mathematics learned in the classroom to real situations increases student motivation and enhances learning. In this paper, we provide an example of a classroom application of calculus to physiology in two courses: "Differential Equations" and "Calculus I for Biology and Medicine." We designed and implemented a project…

Objective: Community colleges have considerable potential to grow the number of individuals who complete STEM baccalaureate degrees and to broaden access to educational opportunities in STEM. However, efforts to tap this potential have been hampered by nagging questions about whether community colleges prepare students adequately for advanced STEM…

Improving student success rates in introductory calculus and physics courses is critically important for our students' path in STEM fields. Many of the students who have an intuitive understanding of physics fail calculus and are pushed to delay or drop their majors in technical fields. One way of addressing this issue is by adopting a program…

This paper demonstrates an experimental integrated lesson of physics and calculus in a topic of fluid force applying on different shapes of dams. This lesson was designed for the first year students in engineering program in an attempt to show them the connection between these two disciplines, as well as to introduce more advanced…

We discuss an investigation of the difficulties that students in a calculus-based university introductory physics course have with electric field and the superposition principle for the case of a continuous charge distribution and how that research was used as a guide in the development, validation, and evaluation of a tutorial on these topics to…

Homework in introductory physics represents an important part of a student's learning experience; therefore, choosing the manner in which homework is presented merits investigation. We performed three rounds of clinical trials comparing the effects of mastery-style homework vs. traditional-style homework with students in both algebra-based and…

We developed a web-based tool to provide students with access to old exam problems and solutions. By controlling the order in which students saw the problems, as well as their access to solutions, we obtained data about student learning by studying old exam problems. Our data suggest that in general students learn from doing old exam problems, and…

Near the conclusion of their final term in the calculus sequence at The United States Military Academy, cadets are given a week long group project. At the end of the week, the project is briefed to their instructors, classmates, and superior officers. From a teaching perspective, the goal is to encapsulate as much of the course as possible in one…