Rethinking course structure: increased participation and persistence in introductory post-secondary mathematics courses
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
High failure and withdrawal rates in introductory post-secondary mathematics courses are a problem locally, nationally, and internationally. This leads to first-year mathematics courses creating a closed door, or a barrier, to further study of mathematics, of STEM disciplines, and in University as a whole. In this article, the authors describe the implementation of a modified course structure in a first-year undergraduate mathematics course. The new structure makes use of a combination of mastery learning strategies together with the beneficial effects of small class sizes to address the issues of historically high failure and withdrawal rates and low grade-point averages. Results show that careful planning of the structure of a course can have a positive effect on student success, and thus on attitude towards mathematics.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it