Friday, October 18, 2013

Career Ladders LearningWorks Report Highlights Benefits of Revamping Math Education


 
career ladders project  
    n e w s f l a s h    O C T O B E R  1 5 , 2 0 1 3
 

New LearningWorks Report 
Highlights Benefits of Revamping Math Education  
  
"Together, the high proportion of community college students requiring math remediation, and the relatively low proportion who succeed in required remedial sequences, make placement in developmental math one of the single greatest barriers to college completion."
 
CHANGING EQUATIONS:
How Community Colleges are Re-Thinking
College Readiness in Math 
  
Experiments to reverse low community college completion rates by redesigning the remedial math most students must take are yielding promising results, defying assumptions about the kind of math students really need.  In a major departure from the traditional one-size-fits-all remedial math sequence that emphasizes intermediate algebra, a growing number of the nation's community colleges are part of a movement to prioritize statistics and quantitative reasoning.
 
Early results - including a dramatic jump from 6 to 51 percent in the share of students completing college-level math in their first year of college -- are lending credence to the theory that the alternative pathways are better tailored to college majors that don't require intermediate algebra. About a quarter of California's 112 community colleges, as well as numerous colleges in about a dozen other states, have begun to develop these alternatives for non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students.
 
This brief was written for LearningWorks by Pamela Burdman, a nationally recognized education policy analyst, philanthropy professional, and journalist.
 
For more information and to download the brief click here.

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