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.
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