Tag: Developmental Math IN Community Colleges.

Redesign Of Remedial Community College Math Yields Impressive Results

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s two newly developed community college mathematics pathways, Quantway™  and Statway™, have demonstrated promising results in their initial implementation during academic year 2011-12. The original goal was to double the proportion of community college students earning college-level math credit within one year, an essential milestone for students who must have that credit to continue to further academic study.  This target was far surpassed in just the first year.

Compared to previous developmental math students from their institutions, the 1,131 students enrolled in Statway™ dramatically increased the success rate of passing a college-level math course (with a grade of C or better). Working with institutional researchers at the colleges, Carnegie established baseline performance network-wide. Typically in the Carnegie network colleges, only 6 percent of developmental math students achieved college math credit within one year and only 16.6 percent of students achieved this goal within three years. In contrast, in the first year of Statway™ implementation, 52 percent achieved this milestone. In other words, Statway™ students more than tripled the success rate in one third of the time.

Quantway™ achieved comparable results. The first semester of Quantway™ was launched this spring serving 573 students in eight colleges. Of those students, 54 percent earned a grade of C or better. Because the first semester of Quantway™ can roughly be thought of as a replacement for the combination of elementary and intermediate algebra, Carnegie compared Quantway™ results to baseline data gathered from the same institutions from those courses. Baseline data indicate that only 8 percent of the developmental math students complete a college-level math class in the first year. Assuming 10 percent attrition between terms and the same pass rate in the second term as in the first term, Quantway™ is on track to achieve a 26 percent success rate, which is more than triple the baseline success rate.