URSP Student Deepthi Jayakumar Researches The Relationship between High School Mathematics and Testing and College Performance

For my research project, I am working under Professor Laurence Bray on a continuing project. The project is to look at the relationship between high school mathematics and testing and college engineering performance. The reason behind this project is that there has been a misconception that students with a strong foundation in math and sciences perform better in an engineering major and are successful in the same career. The purpose for this project is to find if there is a correlation between mathematics and engineering performance in order to better serve and prepare students.

As a bioengineering major, I have always been interested in math and what is has to offer. My knowledge of math from before joining the university has carried me through my higher lever math and engineering courses. There are two main reasons that this project interested me. First, I was interested in learning about what the correlation between math and engineering and how that can be used to better help those students who don’t have the necessary education to do well in engineering courses. And second, I was interested in the idea of doing research in a subject that I have not explored, education. It was new to me and gave me a challenge to something that I only started looking into. So through this project I expected to not only better my skills and experience in research and computational analysis skills, while learning new software platforms , but also to analyze the results and devise a plan that can better help students who lack the necessary mathematics knowledge from falling short in engineering.

On a weekly basis, I am focusing on doing literature review about previous similar projects and looking into the demographics of student in schools and George Mason University. Currently, we are in the process of getting the data from the Registrar’s Office. So far, due to previous preliminary data, students who have a lower math education have a greater chance of repeating courses, switching majors, or leaving the university.