2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Over the last decade, precalculus at Louisiana Tech University has seen many revisions as needs and demands shift for the many STEM majors it services. Originally a 4 SCH course, it was changed to 3 SCH due to hour restrictions in some curricula but did not receive a proportional reduction in content. This dense course contained the majority of college algebra, trigonometry, logic, and a few topics from linear algebra, resulting in an overload in content for most students. Students with strong fundamentals were already experienced with the majority of the content, making the course uninteresting, while those who could benefit most from these topics were often overwhelmed by the rapid pace of the course. These issues, combined with faculty frustrations that precalculus had become primarily review and remediation, led to a curriculum redesign of precalculus to be piloted in fall 2022. The goal of the redesign was to create a course which was themed around a three-part core of logic, area under a curve, and limits while integrating algebra and trigonometry review. Emphasis is placed on exploration, rigorous derivations, and proofs to develop mathematical thinking.

In fall 2022 the pilot was administered to six sections of precalculus. The progress of the students from each section was tracked through the 2022-2023 academic year. Data from exams in their subsequent calculus courses was collected and compared to their peers from non-pilot sections of precalculus to determine if there were statistically significant differences in performance. This paper will outline and detail the curriculum. Statistical results from a preliminary study of effectiveness will be presented and discussed.