The focus of this pragmatic quasi-experimental quantitative case intervention study was to explore the impact of complex video games on academic fatigue on community college Calculus 1 students. The research study was driven by one question. What impact, if any, does the use of complex video games have on academic fatigue from pretest to posttest…

The growth of computer technology into industry, marketing, engineering, and science forces the education sector to focus on training the students with the most advanced technology and prepare them for the technological workplace. The STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) students graduating from universities are required to…

This study compared the outcomes of student learning between an online Pre-Calculus course and a face-to-face Pre-Calculus course. Participants for this study included nine online and 14 face-to-face students from an urban community college in the Southeastern region of the United States. The study data were written responses from the subjects to…

For students with little experience in mathematical thinking and conceptualization, writing-to-learn activities (WTL) can be particularly effective in promoting discovery and understanding. For community college students embarking on a first calculus course in particular, writing activities can help facilitate the transition from an "apply…

Sometimes the best mathematics problems come from the most unexpected situations. Last summer, a Corvette raced down a local quarter-mile drag strip. The driver, a family member, provided the spectators with time and distance-traveled data from his time slip and asked "Can you calculate how many seconds it took me to go from 0 to 60…

Technology-rich student-centered classrooms such as SCALE-UP and TEAL are designed to actively engage students. We examine what happens when the design of the classroom (conventional or teacher-centered versus student-centered classroom spaces) is consistent or inconsistent with the teacher's epistemic beliefs about learning and teaching…

In the deconstruction of the California state standards for trigonometry, linear algebra and mathematical analysis for the Cal-PASS (California Partnership for Achieving Student Success) Content Standards Deconstruction projects, it became apparent that terms were used for which no definition was given. The San Diego Central Cal-PASS Math…

Data suggests that a significant loss of African American students from STEM majors occur between their freshmen and sophomore year. This attrition corresponds to the time period when students encounter the calculus sequence. For this reason, calculus persists as a serious barrier preventing African American students from entering STEM fields.…

This case study documents the struggles and successes encountered by a pre-calculus teacher while using Classroom Connectivity Technology (CCT) daily in her community college mathematics course. CCT refers to a wireless communication system that connects a teacher's computer with an individual student's handheld calculator and has been associated…

To achieve the vision of mathematics set forth in "Crossroads" ("AMATYC," 1995), students must experience mathematics as a sensemaking endeavor that informs their world. Embedding the study of mathematics into the real world is a challenge, particularly because it was not the way that many of us learned mathematics in the first place. This article…

The orders of presentation of pre-calculus and calculus topics, and the notation used, deserve careful study as they affect clarity and ultimately students' level of understanding. We introduce an alternate approach to some of the topics included in this sequence. The suggested alternative is based on years of teaching in colleges within and…

For various reasons there has been a recent trend in college and high school calculus courses to de-emphasize teaching the Partial Fraction Decomposition (PFD) as an integration technique. This is regrettable because the Partial Fraction Decomposition is considerably more than an integration technique. It is, in fact, a general purpose tool which…

As a precursor to lessons on prime decomposition and reducing fractions, rules are generally presented for divisibility by 2, 3, 5, 9, and 10 and sometimes for those popular composites such as 4 and 25. In our experience students often ask: "What about the one for 7?" and we are loathe to simply state that there isn't one. We have yet to see a…

In their sections on inverses most precalculus texts emphasize an algorithm for finding f [superscript -1] given f. However, inspection of precalculus and calculus texts shows that students will never again use the algorithm, which suggests the textbook emphasis may be misplaced. Inverses appear primarily when equations need to be solved, which…

A calculus-free approach is offered for determining the equation of lines tangent to conics. Four types of problems are discussed: line tangent to a conic at a given point, line tangent to a conic passing through a given point outside the conic, line of a given slope tangent to a conic, and line tangent to two conics simultaneously; in each case,…