Links we like!

• A new study from CCCSE makes the case for mandatory requirements. Inside Higher Ed has the details: “Community colleges have a growing arsenal of tools that research shows will help students earn credentials—like academic goal-setting, student success courses and tutoring. Yet the study found that relatively few students take advantage of those offerings.”
• Math is a huge barrier to completion for many students. An article from Joanne Jacobs in U.S. News & World Report tackles an important question: are we “overmathing” our students? Jacobs looks at Virginia’s decision to change math requirements for non-STEM students, and she highlights the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to redesign developmental math through Statway and Quantway.
• “I would suggest that it is time to move from a deficit to an asset model of student success. From a model where we keep trying to ‘fix’ our students to one where we turn the mirror on ourselves and consider that we might have to fundamentally transform how we approach the role of math in preparing a competitive workforce.” Check out the full post from Luzelma Canales of the Lone Star College System in Texas.
• Last week, we linked to a few articles on using technology to “flip” the classroom and individualize learning. A new post from Katie McKay on Digital Is reminds us that equal access to technology for students is increasingly important.
• JFF’s response to President Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address reaffirms the principle that “creating integrated, accelerated educational pathways directly tied to the skills needed by regional employers is the best road to success for those struggling to improve their lives.” That’s a statement we can all agree on!

Adding It Up

In yesterday’s Community College Week, Paul Bradley’s cover story was all about developmental math. Bradley highlights a number of Achieving the Dream colleges that are working hard to solve the developmental math puzzle—and seeing promising results. Of particular interest is the description of the Montgomery County Community College redesign of the lowest-level developmental math course curriculum. Rather than the traditional topical approach to arithmetic instruction, MCCC’s new course, “Concepts of Numbers,” begins with an introduction to the history of math; students then focus more on understanding concepts (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division), rather than memorizing and doing drills (the dreaded “plug and chug!”) Students solve problems together—and they’re succeeding at much higher rates. In spring 2010, seven faculty taught the new course; their students’ success rate was 60 percent, compared with 40 percent in the traditional course. This year at MCCC all introductory courses are using the new curriculum. While there are still challenges, like aligning the new curriculum with subsequent courses, it looks like this new approach to instruction is going to stick at MCCC.

Guest Post: Equity, Opportunity, and Developmental Mathematics

Today’s contributor is Jack Rotman. Jack has been teaching at Lansing Community College in Michigan since 1973, specializing in developmental mathematics. As a member of the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges’ (AMATYC), Jack is involved in a number of efforts to innovate developmental math instruction. Below, he shares his insights into how this work is connected to equitable instruction and opportunity for community college students.

Mathematics often serves as a gatekeeper to credentials in higher education, with the discipline sometimes being placed in this role against our will.  In this post, I will share some thoughts on the connections among developmental mathematics, equity, and current innovations.

We have a tendency to believe that the gaps in equity among student groups are beyond our control, that perhaps inequity is due to lifestyles, culture, or other factors that we cannot influence. However, there exist bodies of knowledge and theories which predict that our instructional design can have profound influence on these inequities if we understand the factors that need to be addressed. For example, in Berliner and Calfee’s Handbook of Educational Psychology,  Webb & Palincsar point out that “ethnic background and race operate as status indicators” in our classrooms, meaning that non-minority students feel more comfortable (contributing, asking questions, etc.). Another related concept from the work of Na’ilah Suad Nasir is the “default trajectory of failure,” where the culture or sub-culture not only accepts failure but expects failure. An exciting body of evidence in social-psychological interventions in education is suggesting some effective means to counter this default trajectory. An analysis of this work is forthcoming from David Yeager and Gregory Walton of Stanford University. For other applications of theories and research, you might start by looking at the work of Craig Nelson who conducts workshops on improving the retention of all students—including minority students—in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. 

Increasing equity involves being aware of language, power, and the social climate in academia. The most fundamental of these ideas is power; without power, there can be no real opportunity, which is the outcome of equity. There are many different power dynamics that play out in an individual classroom, but as professionals, we can consciously employ strategies that build up students’ sense of academic power. In my own classes, I use a combination of “cold calling” to include all students and rotating small groups, along with keeping an eye out to make sure that everybody is active. This kind of empowerment is not a “zero-sum” process; indeed, it is possible to create an environment where all students increase their power in academia.

Evidence shows that HOW we do WHAT we do can move us towards more equitable approaches to developmental mathematics—and some approaches might take us in the wrong direction: One of the current trends in developmental mathematics is the emphasis of online homework systems, and the related module-based redesign efforts. I believe that these trends will not increase equity in our classrooms. Our response needs to include face-to-face time that is structured to empower all students. On the other hand, many colleges are implementing learning communities, and evidence suggests that this practice has a lot of potential to make classrooms more equitable. Another current set of initiatives involves a basic re-design of the curriculum, and this is a good thing from an equity standpoint. The existing curricular model is based on a calculus-target, and a non-engaging set of learning outcomes. Redesigns—like Statway and Quantway, for example—contextualize abstract mathematical concepts with more practical applications; the New Life model is similar, though a more general approach than the Carnegie models. We need to base our curriculum on the mathematics that will inspire students and provide benefits in their non-math courses. You can learn more about other venues exploring this work by following these links:  American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges’ (AMATYC) Developmental Math New Life Community and my blog, Developmental Mathematics Revival.

Jack Rotman has taught at Lansing Community College (MI) since 1973, specializing in developmental mathematics. Jack chaired the Developmental Mathematics Committee of AMATYC twice, from 1993 to 1997, and from 2005 to 2010.  He was a reviewer for the original Crossroads standards (1995), and a contributing writer for the Beyond Crossroads document (2006).  Since 2009, Jack has led the AMATYC ”New Life Project” for developmental mathematics, a project that includes over 60 professionals in a national effort to develop a new model for developmental mathematics. Jack, along with Julie Phelps (Valencia CC, FL), serves as an AMATYC Liaison to the Carnegie Foundation’s pathways work.

Linky, Linky!

To round out our week-long focus on developmental math, we’ve collected some additional reading. Enjoy!

• From Jobs for the Future, with support from MetLife Foundation, a new brief featuring three community colleges that have invested in developmental math improvements and have seen better results for their students: Innovations in Developmental Math: Community Colleges Enhance Support for Nontraditional Students.
• An Education Week article on math anxiety, with neuroscience!
• Also from Education Week, a blog interview with the founder of Mathalicious, an organization that “builds high-quality, standards-based math lessons designed to transform how students learn math, and how teachers teach it.” Though Mathalicious is kind of a silly name and geared toward middle-school math instruction, the focus on problem-solving over procedure could apply to the community college classroom.
• Developmental Mathematics Revival compares mathematics instruction to bowling—you can learn a lot from gutter balls!
• Let’s not forget the Community College Research Center’s Assessment of Evidence series. Working Paper No. 27 fits right in this week: Reforming Mathematics Classroom Pedagogy: Evidence-Based Findings and Recommendations for the Developmental Math Classroom. You can read the full paper or a brief that summarizes the findings.

Guest Post: The Policy of Redesign

Today’s post comes from Cynthia Liston, a Jobs for the Future consultant that is helping facilitate the work of the North Carolina Developmental Education Initiative state policy team. Her description of the DEI Math Task Force is a great example of how a state-level system can act as a convener, bringing faculty and administrators together to address the challenges of developmental math innovation, from assessment, to pedagogy, and all the way to financial aid.

Redesigning developmental math is well underway in North Carolina, and we’re learning a lot as we go. In October 2010 the North Carolina Community College System DEI State Policy Team approved design principles to steer developmental math redesign, as well as a process to identify 18 developmental and curriculum math faculty from across the state to do the “roll up your sleeves” work of curriculum redesign.  

This new DEI Math Task Force started its work in January to create developmental math modules that will result in more flexible paths toward curriculum-level math courses.  In 2012 the new modules will be paired with a to-be-developed custom diagnostic placement test and revised placement policies. North Carolina’s common course numbering system and central system office make this kind of statewide curriculum work possible.

So, how’s it going so far?  Here are a few thoughts to share.  First, early on the faculty team had some “aha” moments. Taking to heart the ambitious design principles, the Task Force decided that to truly affect change, it should do more than reduce curriculum redundancies and take out those competencies better taught at the curriculum level. So while the creation of eight modules, designed so they can be taken in a year in contrast to the current three-semester sequence, is important in and of itself, the modules also incorporate a pedagogical shift. They strive to strengthen students’ conceptual understanding of math through an emphasis on applications and problem-solving. 

One particularly influential piece of research driving this shift has been James Stigler’s (and his colleagues) article “What Community College Developmental Mathematics Students Understand About Mathematics.”  True numeracy means understanding and applying mathematical concepts, but too often students default to “plug and chug” formula-driven approaches. The new modules winnow the number of competencies taught, yet seek deeper understanding of core concepts. This shift means we will need to offer professional development to encourage faculty to move away from procedural-based teaching methods, and the Task Force will create sample assessments and tips to implement this approach.

A current issue is figuring out the changes in colleges’ administrative processes that are necessary to support the new modules. Ideally students will be able to move through modules at different rates—a competency-based approach. But our registration, tuition, and data management systems, as well as Federal financial aid regulations, are contact-hour based. A group of administrators is working on developing new models and processes to address these issues. Please wish them well—this is not easy! 

Stay tuned for implementation updates: beta testing of the modules begins in fall 2011 followed by larger pilots in spring 2012 and rollout across the state in fall 2012.

Cynthia Liston is a Jobs for the Future consultant who is helping facilitate the work of North Carolina’s Developmental Education Initiative state policy team.

Guest Post: A Network Approach to Education Improvement

Accelerating Achievement has already featured STATWAY, an effort of Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to develop a one-year pathway from remedial math to college statistics. Today’s post from Gay Clyburn, associate vice president for public affairs at Carnegie, delves a little deeper into the Foundation’s networked approach to improving developmental math instruction and student outcomes.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is working to help community college students succeed in developmental mathematics. Carnegie aims to double the proportion of students, who, within one year of continuous community college enrollment, are mathematically prepared to succeed in further academic study and/or academic pursuits, regardless of limitations that they may have in language, literacy, and mathematics and their ability, on entry, to navigate college. The $13 million initiative, funded now by six foundations, is building a networked community working on the development of two newly designed mathematics pathways.

The Statistics Pathway (Statway) will move developmental math students to and through transferable college statistics in one year. The Quantitative Literacy Pathway (Quantway) is a one-semester course that will prepare students to take a Quantitative Reasoning or non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college-level course already available at the college, or to enter a vocational specific program requiring mastery of developmental math concepts. Both the Statway and Quantway include an intensive student engagement component within the classroom environment focused on increasing student tenacity, as well as helping students develop tools to navigate college. We are currently working with 30 colleges.

The Network
We are catalyzing and supporting the growth of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to develop these two pathways. Specifically, the Carnegie network involves the community college faculty in participating institutions who teach and implement the math pathway, and with Carnegie’s improvement specialists and researchers, tests hypotheses, provide for local adaptations, and over time contribute to the modification of the pathway. The NIC also includes deans, institutional researchers, and others who address the institutional requirements; thinking partners who are those individuals with technical and substantive expertise; Carnegie staff who provide ongoing support and who are documenting the work; and NIC leadership, the formal body that tends to the health and well being of the network itself.

Our major partner in this work is the Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which is developing open access instructional resources organized in a core curriculum with accompanying instructional philosophy. We have also engaged a number of key organizational partners to both guide and help us support the scaling of this work.

The Approach
Carnegie is developing and promoting a Research and Development (R&D) infrastructure that we call Improvement Research that allows us to cull and synthesize the best of what we know from scholarship and practice, rapidly develop and test prospective improvements, deploy what we learn about what works in schools and classrooms, and add to our knowledge to continuously improve the performance of the system.  Beyond leading the co-development of the Statway and Quantway, we are orchestrating a common knowledge development and management system to guide network activity, and make certain that whatever we build and learn becomes a resource to others as these efforts grow to scale. We believe that this approach will not only produce powerful solutions to the challenges of developmental mathematics, but will also offer a prototype of a new infrastructure for research and development. Carnegie’s aim is to support system reforms that will simultaneously impact community college instruction, the field of developmental mathematics and the process of continuous educational improvement.

For more information or to get involved, email Carnegie at pathways@carnegiefoundation.org.

Gay Clyburn is associate vice president, public affairs, at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. You can download a Carnegie paper about Networked Improvement Communities from the Resources page of the DEI website in the “Curricular and Instructional Revisions” section.

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.

Adapting the Way We Learn

Yesterday, we wrote about using technology to support tailored instruction. Technology isn’t just providing an opportunity for us to find new methods of delivering information; it is also fundamentally changing the content of our courses. Over the weekend, NPR ran a story about the changing ways that elementary-level math is taught. As computers have become omnipresent in our lives, it has become less important for us to be able to actually do the math. Rather than being able to complete arithmetic problems, students now-a-days need to be able to understand the thinking behind arithmetic.The same could be said about higher levels of math. It is more important for students to be comfortable constructing a formula than it is to plug numbers into a formula and solve it. Since technology has altered the way we use knowledge, it makes sense for it to alter the way we learn it, too.

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.