From Assigned to Chosen Academic Contexts: Longitudinal Traces of Student Engagement and Adaptation in First-Year University Mathematics

Summary

An administrative-data study of \(n=6{,}627\) students that distinguishes academic context, experienced performance, formal help-seeking, later context selection, and subsequent outcomes. The analysis identifies five first-course states, examines later Calculus enrolment, and follows adaptation after failed first-course attempts while keeping the findings descriptive rather than causal.

Context

The paper treats assigned first-year instruction, classroom-relative performance, formal support use, later instructor enrolment, and repeated attempts as distinct longitudinal traces rather than as a single measure of engagement.

Main contributions

• Distinguishes classroom context, classroom-relative performance, formal mathematics-support use, later context selection, and subsequent outcomes.
• Summarizes first-course experiences into five states and tests their stability across nine pre-specified definitions of performance and contextual difficulty.
• Examines later Calculus enrolment using instructor outcomes ranked from strictly prior information.
• Shows how instructor changes and movement toward historically higher-outcome instructors appear after failed first-course attempts, without identifying causal effects or latent engagement.