Calculus as a Modeling Course at Macalester College

By David Bressoud

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When I talk with individuals who are wrestling with improving their calculus program, I often describe calculus at Macalester. For over 15 years, we have approached the first calculus course as a modeling course, drawing inspiration from many of the early calculus reform efforts. This month’s column will look at how we came to revise Calculus I in this way, a sample of the curriculum, and thoughts on implementation.

Old Main lawn. Macalester College

Origins

The revision of Calculus I began when Professor Kaplan, then a faculty member whose research was in mathematical models of biological phenomena, looked at transcripts of students who had passed through Calculus I and II. He discovered that, although this is framed as a full-year course, few students took it as such. As was true then and still holds true, the bulk of Calculus I enrollments come from Biology and Economics majors for whom only Calculus I is required and usually only Calculus I is taken. But the traditional Calculus I does not make sense as a stand-alone course. Most of these students were learning how to find derivatives with little sense of why they were doing it. Calculus II enrollments were predominantly prospective mathematics, physics, and chemistry majors as well as the strongest economics majors. Even fifteen years ago, almost all of these students arrived at Macalester having already earned credit for Calculus I. Rather than a course that picked up two-thirds of the way through a course they had already completed, what they needed was a more intensive understanding of both differential and integral calculus.

With financial support from the administration, Kaplan began to shape the introductory courses that our biology majors most needed, a Calculus I with a focus on modeling that could stand on its own, to be followed by a statistics course that emphasized statistical modeling. The sequence that resulted has been described in "The First Year of Calculus and Statistics at Macalester College" (Flath et al, 2013) in the MAA Notes volume that I reviewed in Mathematics for the Biological Sciences (February, 2014).

We are a small college and cannot afford to offer more than one flavor of calculus. Kaplan arranged for the funding to include team-teaching these courses during the first two developmental years. This involved a large fraction of our departmental faculty in shaping these courses, ensuring both a great deal of useful feedback and a strong buy-in to Kaplan’s vision. Major efforts of outreach and explanation with the partner disciplines that required calculus eventually brought them all on board, either enthusiastically as in the case of biology and economics, or reluctantly as with physics. When the time came to decide whether we would embrace this as our only Calculus I course, the department unanimously supported it.

Curriculum 

I last taught Calculus I as a modeling course in fall, 2015. Over the years, this course has been subject to continual monitoring and adjustment. What I describe here is simply a snapshot of one moment in an evolving process, but the goals and essential elements of the course have not changed. We want students to finish the course with an appreciation for calculus as a tool for modeling dynamical systems, which means an emphasis throughout on differential equations. In addition, the most interesting and instructive dynamical systems are multi-dimensional, including SIR and predator-prey models. The course employs functions of several variables from the start. Finally, the emphasis is on numerical and qualitative analysis of these models. The procedures of differentiation and integration get less attention that in a traditional course.

No existing textbook fits the course we have built, but we used Hughes-Hallett et al. Applied Calculus (HH). In 2015, there were seven major sections to the course, described below, with indications of the relevant sections of the 5th edition. To anyone who has access to Moodle and wishes the full syllabus and supplementary materials, I can send the Moodle backup for this course.

1. Functions as Models. (6 days, HH 1.1–1.3, 1.5–1.7, 1.9–1.10, 8.1–8.2, and supplemental materials). In one sense this was a review of the functions that students should be familiar with from high school: linear, power, exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions, as well as functions of two variables. But the emphasis was on the phenomena that are modeled by each of these types of functions. For exponential and logarithmic functions, attention was paid to the relationship with doubling times. For trigonometric functions, we focused on how to translate knowledge of the range and period of a periodic phenomenon into the formulation of the corresponding sine or cosine. This is also when we introduced students to the software they would be using, in our case R-Studio (chosen so that they could use the same software for the statistical modeling course).
2. Units, Dimensions, and Estimation. (3 days, supplemental materials) This is a unit that focuses on key quantitative skills that all college graduates, especially those in quantitative fields, should possess, but are never explicitly taught: understanding scale, the effect of powers of ten, how dimension affects scale, dimensional analysis as a short-cut to finding and remembering formulas, and the kind of estimation found in Fermi problems.
3. Concepts of Derivatives.  (4 days, HH 2.1–2.3, 8.3, and supplemental materials) We avoid a formal definition of the derivative in terms of limits and instead focus on what is happening to the average rate of change as the time intervals get shorter. As soon as we have explained the concept of the derivative, we extend it to partial and directional derivatives of functions of two variables.
4. Symbolic Differentiation. (5 days, HH 3.1–3.5, 8.3–8.4, and supplemental materials) This is a fairly traditional treatment of derivatives. Topics include derivatives of polynomials as well as exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions, and the product, quotient, and chain rules. We spend one of these days fitting data to various kinds of models.
5. Optimization. (5 days, HH 4.1–4.3, 8.5–8.6, and supplemental materials) This section starts with traditional optimization techniques and problems, but then moves on to optimizing functions of two variables and constrained optimization problems for functions of two variables, including a very geometric explanation of Lagrange multipliers.
6. Integration and Accumulation. (7 days, HH 5.1–5.5, 6.1, 6.3, and supplemental materials) This starts with integration as accumulation, leading up to the Fundamental Theorem of Integral Calculus, 2 days of antidifferentiation as a tool for evaluating definite integrals, followed by a one-day introduction to integrals of functions of two variables.
7. Models of Change. (7 days, HH 10.1–10.7 and supplemental materials) This proceeds from a basic introduction to differential equations, through slope fields as means of visualizing solutions, exponential growth and decay, the SIR model, and predator-prey models, ending with a discussion of stability and equilibria.

Thoughts on Implementation

This variation on Calculus I will not work everywhere. It is difficult because there is no textbook that is a good fit, and we have found that faculty teaching it for the first time need a good deal of support. It also does not articulate well with the standard calculus curriculum. At Macalester, with very few students transferring in or out, this is not a problem, but it would be at public universities.

The change in Calculus I also forced major changes to Calculus II. Eventually, Macalester redesigned the entire Calculus I through III sequence to fit this image of calculus as a modeling course with single variable and multivariable functions handled simultaneously. We now call this sequence Applied Multivariable Calculus I, II, and III. This is scary for the student who thinks of multivariable calculus as the course that follows two semesters of single variable calculus, but the title provides an accurate description.

The sequence works very well for us. Learning why calculus is useful has attracted many students into further courses. It has also led to beefing up our upper division applied mathematics and statistics options. This past spring, we graduated 54 majors in mathematics or applied mathematics and statistics out of a graduating class of about 500. Next year, we expect at least 60 majors in mathematics or applied mathematics and statistics. It definitely is working for us.

Nothing communicates what is valued in a course better than how student success is assessed. For that reason, I am concluding this article with links to the exams I administered in 2015. Midterms 1 and 2 were given in class. The final exam was a take-home. In addition, students were graded on WeBWorK problems, more challenging weekly problems that required careful write-up, and Reading Reflections submitted the night before each class to ensure that students had read the relevant material before class.

• Midterm I, based on sections 1, 2, and 3
• Midterm II, based on sections 4, 5, and 6
• Final Exam, comprehensive, but emphasis on section 7

Reference

Flath, D., Halverson, T., Kaplan, D. and Saxe, K. 2013. The first year of calculus and statistics at Macalester College. pp. 39–44 in Undergraduate Mathematics for the Life Sciences: Models, Processes, and Direction. Ledder, Carpenter, and Comar, eds. MAA Notes #81. Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America. www.maa.org/publications/ebooks/undergraduate-mathematics-for-the-life-sciences