It's about time: the relationships between coverage and instructional practices in college calculus

Abstract

This paper is based on a large-scale empirical study designed to investigate Calculus I programmes across the United States to better understand the relationship between instructors' concerns about coverage, instructional practices, and the nature of the material covered. We found that there was no association between instructors feeling pressured to go through material quickly to cover all the required topics and intended pacing. Furthermore, our results suggest that both intended pacing and feelings of pressure are poor indicators of instructional practices.

Keywords:

• calculus
• coverage
• teaching practices
• pacing

Subject classification codes:

• 97

Acknowledgement

We would like to acknowledge the survey development and data collection efforts made by the entire CSPCC team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For more information on the study, see www.maa.org/CSPCC

2. Kendall's tau coefficient was also investigated and produced similar results.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 0910240].