Examining the Efficacies of High School Calculus Programs

The focus of my thesis is the International Baccalaureate program, which is a high school diploma program which emphasizes academic rigor and intercultural understanding among its main tenets. I had two goals in this thesis: first, to investigate the characteristics of students who took calculus in the International Baccalaureate program and compare them to students who took calculus in other high school programs and to students who took no calculus at all before taking it in college; and second, to probe what kinds of differences exist in students’ performance on their first college calculus courses based on the type of high school calculus course they had taken, if any. I used data from the FICSMath survey to perform these analyses. The results included some anomalous findings in the demographic makeup of the IB student sample, notably in the racial profile of the group. I also found links to the IB origins as a program to accommodate international students. In answering the second research question, I found that the performance of the IB students was not significantly different from that of other students who had previously taken calculus in high school; the only group which performed significantly differently from the IB students was those who had had no prior calculus experience before taking their first college calculus course. All of my main effects variables were significant in the regression model, and there were no significant interaction terms