RUME 28
2026
Alexandria, Virginia
Integrated Math/Biology Lessons for Approaches to College Mathematics
Page: 1295
Addressing the needs of freshmen who fail college Precalculus or its placement exam, Institution State University (ISU) began offering an Approaches to College Mathematics (ACM) course in Fall 2024. ACM lessons are designed to engage and support students while attending to their struggles with mathematics. One common struggle is interpreting graphs. Responding to research on benefits of integrated STEM lessons and surveys showing that many ACM students are prospective biology majors, the ACM team designed an integrated math/biology lesson where students analyze graphs from ISU’s introductory biology text. In this paper we report on the first iteration of our design experiment on this lesson and analyze student work for evidence of integrated reasoning and static or emergent shape thinking (Moore & Thompson, 2015). We describe features of students’ engagement with the lesson and reasoning about these graphs. We discuss how differences between math and biology textbook graphs highlight students’ struggles.