Six Years of Data is In! I love my Calculus/Physics Learning Community.

Learning Community (LC) faculty have been saying for 6 years that the main focus on the LC is to help students in future STEM courses.  Majoring in a STEM field is difficult; math is a barrier for most students.  Approximately 20% of community college students start as a STEM major with 69% of them changing it to non-STEM.  The LC course is designed to help students be successful STEM students and truly understand how math and physics are intertwined.  So, student grades were analyzed from fall 2010 - spring 2016.  Students that went through the LC vs. those that did not did very well in university physics II and III (95% and 100% passing rates for both groups, respectively).  For calculus III, 81.5% non LC students passed the course the first time while 95.3% of the LC students passed.  A chi-square test of independence was used to test the relation between completing the LC and passing MAT241 at EMCC. We found that there is a significant relationship X^2 (1, N=215) = 7.42, p<.01. Those students who completed the LC were significantly more likely to pass MAT241 than students who did not take the LC. See attached for more detail.