Students as Partners in Curricular Design: Creation of Student-Generated Calculus Projects

TL;DR

This study explores how involving students as project creators and tutors in Calculus II enhances their understanding, confidence, and research skills through a course redesign that integrates student-generated projects and peer tutoring.

Contribution

It demonstrates the benefits of student involvement in curricular design and research, providing qualitative evidence on improved confidence and understanding among student designers and tutors.

Findings

Tutors gained more confidence in calculus and teaching insights.

Project designers experienced research-like benefits.

Course redesign improved student engagement and learning.

Abstract

For the past five years advanced students have developed projects for our redesigned Calculus II classes to use. Our student project designers are often mathematically early in their careers, and so this provides them with an opportunity to create and explore new mathematics while giving us the ability to involve students of all levels in research projects. It also gives them the chance to present their work at conferences and local talks. Our course redesign affected three groups of students: ones taking the class, ones designing projects for the course, and embedded tutors. This qualitative study examines how the second and third groups of students benefited from their experiences and how we can modify our program to improve it. Evidence was gathered from interviews, surveys, and observation of student research work and its implementation in the classroom. We found that tutors reported more confidence in their knowledge of calculus and insights into teaching it, and project designers experienced similar benefits to that of a traditional research experience.