Engagement in practice: Co-creation process in higher education contexts to innovate in pre-calculus curriculum

Abstract

In Colombia, Engineering Education faces some significant challenges. According to the 'Dropout Prevention and Analysis System' of the Ministry of Education, only 28% of engineering students complete their studies and graduate, and the national dropout rate for first-semester students in engineering programs is around 25%. According to the Ministry of Education, one of the reasons is related to students failing Pre-calculus courses more than once, caused probably by math competences low level upon university admission, low motivation for this subject and disconnection with real context problems. OCDE 2015 report explains this fact since it states that high school students in Colombia score 390 points in mathematics below the OECD, Chile (423 points) and Mexico (408 points) average in the PISA1 test. To design and implement a possible solution to this challenge, a team of researchers from 'Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios-UNIMINUTO, created a robotics curriculum adapted to the pre-calculus mandatory course, through a co-creation process, in which teachers, researchers, and students participated. As result of this process, ten context-oriented and challenge-based didactic guides were created using robotics, mathematics, realistic problems and XXI century skills. Furthermore, teachers and students' perception changed positively, and students using the new curriculum were found to have much better completion rates in their pre-calculus course. This article presents a community engagement model to design and implement engineering education curriculums, where the engagement of multiple parties for problem identification and solution development, that could help students to obtain better math results.