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Teaching

Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, sign up to receive it in your email inbox.

February 8, 2018
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From: Beckie Supiano

Subject: How to Help Students of Differing Abilities

Welcome to Teaching, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s newsletter. Today, Dan will be your guide as we talk about one of the biggest academic obstacles for students, highlight some recent writing to catch up on, and answer a burning question you asked us last week in our first reader survey.

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Welcome to Teaching, The Chronicle of Higher Education’s newsletter. Today, Dan will be your guide as we talk about one of the biggest academic obstacles for students, highlight some recent writing to catch up on, and answer a burning question you asked us last week in our first reader survey.

The Progress Stopper

Remedial math courses can be a big trap for many students. Nearly 60 percent of community-college students and about a third of those at public four-year institutions take these non-credit-bearing courses — and many of them fail to finish them, according to federal data.

To eliminate these roadblocks, many colleges, states, and systems of higher education have tried different approaches: using multiple measures instead of a single test to assign students to courses, limiting the number of remedial courses they must take, or even eliminating such courses altogether — or some combination.

One approach that’s been getting a lot of attention in recent years is the “corequisite” model, which places remedial-level students in a credit-bearing course instead, and gives them extra learning support in the form of tutoring, labs, or workshops.

The City University of New York is testing out this model and studying the results as part of something called the Project for Relevant and Improved Mathematics Education. The effort has produced results: It has brought together faculty members of three colleges in the CUNY system who have developed college-level quantitative reasoning, statistics, and chemistry courses, each of them with corequisite support. And students who were randomly assigned to college-level statistics courses with corequisite remedial workshops, for example, passed at a rate that was 16 percentage points higher than those who were assigned to traditional remedial algebra.

Results like these are encouraging, but now researchers are trying to figure out how and why the approach seems to work, said Alexandra Logue, a research professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center, who is the principal investigator of the effort.

One of the institutions she and her colleagues have been studying is the College of Coastal Georgia, which has been discovering some important nuances over the past several years. For starters, the corequisite approach shouldn’t try to do too much; it can’t backfill everything students didn’t learn in high school, said German Vargas, assistant vice president for academic student engagement there. Every piece of content that students cover in their corequisite labs should also be part of the main course, he said.

The college also tries to strike the right balance in each class between the number of students who need remediation and those who don’t. A good mix seems to be 15 of the former and 20 of the latter. Shift the balance, he said, and you risk compromising the integrity of the credit-bearing gateway course.

Putting lessons and the extra learning support in the proper order also requires careful thought. It seems to work best when the learning-support sessions cover material just before it comes up in the main course. “It gives me the opportunity to turn them into good students before the content is delivered,” said Vargas, who is also an associate professor of math. For most students, he said, the problem isn’t really their ability, it’s their study habits and skills.

How does your institution handle remediation in math or other subjects? Have you tried this corequisite approach? If so, have you studied the results — and what have you found? Please email me at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, and I may include your response in a future newsletter.

ICYMI

  • One reason many professors don’t want to retool their courses, particularly introductory ones, is because they’re worried about covering the basics of a discipline for those students who might major in it. But covering less material in more depth can often help students learn. Paula Marantz Cohen wrote in The Chronicle about how she spent more time on a narrower range of literature as part of what she calls “slow teaching.” Barbara King, writing for NPR, recently made similar observations. The approach is one that Cohen thinks professors in other disciplines can adopt. But it would mean, she wrote, that “we would have to honestly evaluate what is necessary in the curriculum and what is only there owing to tradition or pride in one’s own expertise.”
  • Speaking of survey courses — they can be imperfect formats in which to teach. They’re often big and suffer from diverging assumptions: Should they be thought of as a gateway for future majors, or as the last time students will be exposed to a subject? Writing in The Chronicle, James Lang describes how some of his colleagues have reinvented the literature survey in ways that might be adapted to other disciplines. One idea is what one professor calls a “blank syllabus,” in which students identify a work they want to discuss, write an essay arguing why it should be included in the course, and then help lead a discussion about it. If that approach intrigues you, you can also check out this piece, in which Lang explores other ways to give students control over their learning.
  • Are you troubled by headlines about our fracturing electorate, and wondering what colleges can do to help? Teaching civic learning is a topic The Chronicle has explored from several angles, including a recent Idea Lab on the topic. The current issue of Peer Review, a journal published by the Association of American Colleges & Universities, also examines this subject, and how disciplines can include civic learning in their courses.

Mark Your Calendars

  • The annual meeting of the First-Year Experience, a meeting for those who work with freshmen, takes place this weekend in San Antonio.
  • AAC&U’s conference on General Education and Assessment: Foundations for Democracy meets February 15-17, in Philadelphia.

We Hear You!

Last week we conducted our very first reader survey. Thanks to all of you who responded. We’re so glad to hear how much you like Teaching — and we heard a common complaint. Many of you don’t like the font and format of this newsletter. Without boring you with the technical details, this is a result of the platforms we use and our desire to be readable on the widest range of email clients. Fortunately, we have an alternative: Every week, we post a version of the newsletter on our website, and it looks like any other article on chronicle.com. We hope this makes for a more pleasant reading experience.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.

— Dan

Teaching & Learning
Beckie Supiano
Beckie Supiano writes about teaching, learning, and the human interactions that shape them. Follow her on Twitter @becksup, or drop her a line at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
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