In Texas, a community college is offering innovative approaches to meeting developmental math needs.
Eastland College now targets specific concept weaknesses, so that a student whose weakness is only in one or two sub-areas of math can do intensive work on those fields and then can move more quickly into college-level work.
Eastland is also offering summer remedial math sections so that students can start the fall “math ready,” and then grouping those students in science courses designed to reinforce their math skills.
Those ideas are designed to extend the College's already strong record increasing enrollment in STEM majors and increasing persistence in those majors to graduation or transfer to a four-year school. (Article in Inside Higher Ed, with hat tip to CPE press clips.)
Susan,
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Northern Kentucky University, spearheaded by Dean Gail Wells and Mathematics Professor Steve Newman, and others have been doing all sorts of imaginative things in math for years.
The Council of Partners that they and concerned math educators like teacher Dottie Miller and the staff at Thomas More College started a decade ago pushed for such things as a college math readiness test for high school students (which later expanded statewide) and pre-Admission Summer catch-up courses.
This isn’t a new effort – at least not in Northern Kentucky. It’s been going on for over a decade up here.
From the little information you provide, it looks like Eastland College could have gotten their ideas from a great college-school cooperative effort in N. KY.
Thank you for the added information on a related Kentucky effort.
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