GROUP TESTING AND SENSE OF BELONGING IN REFORM-BASED CALCULUS: EQUITABLE FOR ALL WOMEN?

Abstract

There continues to be a national concern about the shortage of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates needed to fill current and anticipated STEM workforce positions. There is an additional concern regarding attracting and maintaining women in the STEM disciplines. In this study, I investigated one part of the STEM workforce problem by focusing on women in Calculus I courses who intend to major in a STEM discipline. Calculus presents a unique leak in the STEM pipeline for women because women who perform poorly in calculus are more likely to leave STEM fields than men who perform poorly in calculus. The main focus of this study is women’s sense of belonging in calculus, as sense of belonging is one reason women leave the historically male-dominated STEM fields. Specifically, this study investigates the communication women have with their peers in a group test environment and how these interactions may influence the women’s sense of belonging to a mathematics community. The main purpose of my study was to examine the social interactions of the group members during a group test, the differences in the interactions for groups with different compositions, and how the interactions might explain changes in the women’s sense of belonging to mathematics in a reform Calculus I course. Women’s communication around a group testing activity in Calculus I is significant because it has the potential to change assessment practices and promote retention of women in STEM by increasing women’s collaboration and sense of belonging in a STEM community in a course required of all STEM majors. I used an exploratory descriptive mixed methods design to investigate female students’ sense of belonging and their social interactions with group members in a Calculus I reform class. The results of the study revealed: (1) white women performed better when tested individually than in groups, (2) students who are under-represented minorities by race performed better when tested in groups than individually, (3) groups with more women had more equitable social interactions around the mathematics, (4) groups with only women felt more frustrated and asked more questions around the mathematics, (5) when studying communication and sense of belonging in mathematics, researchers may need to consider the intersectionality of race and gender.