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“In the past, most mathematics in higher education was what you needed to be an engineer or physicist,” said Philip Uri Treisman, a professor of mathematics and director of the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin. The center works to create equitable pathways to student success in math and science. “It was very heavily algebra dependent.”
Today, many careers will require graduates who can manage data and work with technology. They might be better served by a focus on statistics, quantitative reasoning, or technical math, Treisman said.
It’s not a matter of replacing algebra as a default college math requirement; it’s a matter of simply offering different paths for students with different needs and interests. The turf wars that sometimes break out among mathematicians when such changes are debated are “like water arguing which is more important — hydrogen or oxygen,” Treisman said.
Emerging evidence shows that when students take math courses that are relevant to their interests, they’re more motivated and more likely to advance to pass college-level courses. A history or Spanish major might satisfy a math requirement with quantitative reasoning; a political-science or journalism student with statistics. Math and economics majors would stick with algebra.
Fifty-nine percent of community-college students and 33 percent of students at four-year public colleges test into developmental math, according to the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness and Education Commission of the States. Students who are offered alternative pathways are nearly 50 percent more likely to pass college-level math than are traditional developmental students, it found.
Similar math pathways have been developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the California Acceleration Project.
In addition to customized math pathways, colleges have been experimenting with so-called adaptive learning technologies that allow students to work at their own pace. Long Beach Community College, in California, offers remedial math workshops that use a McGraw-Hill product called Aleks. The software monitors a student and then alerts both the student and the professor to topics on which more learning or practice is needed.
About 70 percent of the students in these sections pass, compared with fewer than 50 percent in regular sections, a case study on the approach found.
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