Guest Post: More Than Reshuffling

This week, Accelerating Achievement will focus on developmental math. We’ll look at innovative program design, state policy supports, and the latest research on what works. We begin with a summary of a recent paper from Steve Hinds, university mathematics staff developer at the City University of New York. Below, Steve introduces the design, implementation, and early outcomes of the College Transition Initiative, a CUNY program that is restructuring developmental math pedagogy with promising results.

More Than Reshuffling—Lessons from an Innovative Remedial Math Program at The City University of New York describes the teaching and learning practices of an intensive remedial math program at The City University of New York (a part of the College Transition Initiative, or CTI), and puts that work in a larger context of community college remedial math reform in the U.S. CTI is actually a reconfiguration of an earlier program that provided GED graduates with an intensive semester of study after they completed that credential but before they entered college.

The paper begins by outlining the structure of CTI, including who is eligible, the schedule of instruction and advisement, cost, and the basic staffing. The program targets students who are considered to be the least likely to be successful in their college study based on their need for multiple remedial courses in mathematics, reading, and writing. Enrollment and retention data are described for students who participated in the first two CTI semesters (fall 2009 and spring 2010).

Assessing student learning takes many forms in the CTI math course, and the paper includes description of how this is accomplished. Many people will focus on CTI students’ end-of-course placement exam results because of the high stakes attached to them (and these scores are very encouraging), but I make the argument that the COMPASS math placement exams do a poor job of measuring some of the most important gains that students make during the CTI math course.

The innovative teaching and learning practices in CTI math are compared with more traditional teaching practices that exist and that are encouraged in standards documents for K-12 and community college settings. CTI math instructors utilize what are called “balanced/constructivist” teaching methods, and in doing so go beyond a limited emphasis on procedural fluency to also promote students’ conceptual understanding, communication skills, and other components of a broad notion of what it means to be mathematically proficient. This section also refers to a 2009 companion paper I also wrote that gives more description and rationale for the pedagogical emphases in the course, and also includes detailed examples from the curriculum.

The major claim of this paper is that community college remedial mathematics reform should be centered on improvements in teaching methods, should move in a “balanced/constructivist” direction, and should not be limited to the more common “reshuffling” of traditional teaching practices. Changing teaching practices is a great challenge, though, and the paper describes in detail how efforts in this direction must simultaneously embrace new thinking on instructional intensity, content, assessment, administration, and faculty development.

Steve Hinds is the university mathematics staff developer at the The City University of New York. You can download “More than Reshuffling” and the companion paper, " More than Rules,” from the Resources page of the DEI website, in the “Curricular and Instructional Revisions” section.