● Colleges must be more strategic about how they reform developmental education in order to prepare larger portions of students to do college-level math and English, a new report from the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University urges. The report calls for “institutional self-inquiry” and invites educators to “examine their context and the experiences of their students” in order to identify and remove specific barriers for various students and student subgroups.
● The report highlights four community colleges — The Community College of Baltimore County in Maryland; Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee; Arkansas State University Mid-South; and Hartnell College — that participated in a “community of practice” that focused on improving outcomes in developmental education. It also examines new ways to assess math; enable students to take college-level courses while still enrolled in their developmental courses; and develop math lessons that bear more relevance to students’ lives instead of doing “decontexualized” math problems.
● The report examines the role of factors such as “math anxiety” and negative “faculty mindsets” in which developmental education instructors view their students as a “burden.” And it notes that while math could potentially be a “tool” to examine problems of cultural and political relevance to students, many educators are “hesitant to communicate about student identity" and view math as “culture-free,” which the report says can make it difficult to implement culturally relevant ways of teaching.
The bigger picture:
Math has long been recognized as a stumbling block for students who struggle academically or who hail from racially marginalized groups. As one exposé found in 2013, three out of every five Black students who dropped out of an open-access university in the Midwest had not completed the university’s math requirement.
A lot of the problems with math surface at the K-12 level. For instance, scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, show that only 39% of the nation’s fourth-graders were proficient in math. For eighth-graders, the proficiency rate is 28%.
While some urban district administrators, such as incoming Baltimore public schools chief Jermaine Dawson — a mathematician by training — have helped improve math proficiency rates and are vowing to do more, the reality is thousands of students are still showing up at college unprepared to do college algebra — a hurdle they’ll need to clear in order to earn a bachelor’s degree.
In dealing with such students, the Community College Research Center recommends that educators approach their challenges with “creativity and care.” It warns that some reform efforts have actually backfired and left some students worse off than before. “Faculty, staff, and administrators are pivotal in shaping course curriculum, teaching decisions, the psychological dimensions of learning, academic supports, and campus culture to promote more equitable outcomes and success for students,” it says.
