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.
