SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Contrary to widely-held opinion, taking high school calculus isn't necessary for success later in college calculus—what's more important is mastering the prerequisites, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—that lead to calculus. That's according to a study of more than 6,000 college freshmen at 133 colleges carried out by the Science Education Department of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, led by Sadler, the Frances W. Wright Senior Lecturer on Astronomy, and by Sonnert, a Research Associate.In addition, the survey finds that weaker math students who choose to take calculus in high school actually get the most benefit from the class. The study is described in a May 2018 paper published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.
"We study the transition from high school to college, and on one side of that there are college professors who say calculus is really a college subject, but on the other side there are high school teachers who say calculus is really helpful for their students, and the ones who want to be scientists and engineers get a lot out of it," Sadler said. "We wanted to see if we could settle that argument—which is more important, the math that prepares you for calculus or a first run-through when you're in high school followed by a more serious course in college?"
The study's results, Sadler said, provided a clear answer -a firmer grip on the subjects that led up to calculus had twice the impact of taking the subject in high school. And of those who did take calculus in high school, it was the weakest students who got the most from the class.
To get those findings, Sadler and Sonnert, designed a study that asked thousands of college freshmen to report not only demographic information, but their educational history, background and mathematics training.
https://phys.org/news/2018-07-mastering-prerequisitesnot-calculus-high-schoolbetter.html
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday August 09 2018, @08:49PM
I took calculus at 17, too. Back then, it was compulsory in Greece, if you followed the "practical" direction of studies, as opposed to the "classical" direction, where students were taught Latin, with a more generous helping of ancient Greek than what we got in the "practical direction".
The teacher was great, we got to understand exactly what differential calculus was about, and we got to solve all sorts of problems in almost magical ways using derivatives. At the end of the school year, we dabbled a bit with integral calculus. Although I understood what it was about (sort of the reverse of differential calculus), I found it way over my head.
As to whether it helped me with my university engineering courses, I'm not sure it did. Our four semesters of math were on linear algebra, not calculus, and what courses did require calculus, involved some other, more complicated calculus, that we were somehow supposed to pick up on our own, without being given any tutoring or explanation. We were taught Maxwell's equations, e.g., which involved dels and line integrals, which we had not been taught at high school, but were somehow required to understand and be able to handle with ease, just by being given a definition.