The Envelope, Please!! The answer is …

The next AMATYC Webinar will be April 3 (3pm EDT).  My goal in doing this webinar is to provide some answers to help you deal with the present … and the future.  See http://www.amatyc.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1084248 for details.

In order to understand the present and future, we need to gain some understanding of the past.  Therefore, the first part of the webinar will present a fast-paced summary of where developmental mathematics has been in the prior 40 to 50 years.  We will see that some of the current trends had their origins in past practices in the profession.

The second portion of the webinar deals with the present, responding to the primary current theme … “minimization” (pathways & co-requisite remediation being specifics).  I will share our current curricular structure at Lansing Community College — providing a template which any college can implement, without depending on grant money nor on external directives.  You will see modern curricular standards in practice.

The third portion, somewhat intertwined with the second, deals with the future … what is a viable structure for both ‘developmental mathematics’ and college mathematics in the first two years?  You may discover that the current all-purpose ‘solutions’ are not projected to be a central component of our future mathematical landscape; co-requisite remediation has a role in the future, just not primarily as math avoidance.

Throughout the webinar, we will keep the focus on mathematics — good mathematics for ALL students, opening doors previously closed and allowing every student access to upward-mobility.  Embracing mathematics will be our goal, and that includes the scourge of Complete College America — “ALGEBRA”.  Not your grandmother’s algebra … not your father’s algebra … but algebra as part of an education resulting in better lives for our students.

I hope that you are able to participate in this webinar; feel free to invite non-AMATYC members to view with you.  I am especially interested in academic leaders and policy makers/influencers being a part of the process.  I am working hard to make this webinar enjoyable, helpful and possibly inspiring.

The webinar link is http://www.amatyc.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1084248

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Our Future … Are we Creating it? Or, Putting up with It?

We are familiar with the types of changes that are currently happening in developmental mathematics and general education mathematics, with pathways and co-requisite structures.  Certainly, large forces in these changes are external — legislation, state direction, and institutional leadership.  Are we abrogating our responsibilities to create the future shape of college mathematics?

The most fundamental nature of a profession is that it changes over time to reach a more ideal state; you might even call this ‘making progress’.  When change is primarily imposed on the profession (which has occurred frequently in our profession), the changes do not normally reflect the values and standards of the profession.  Obviously, quite a few of us are distressed for this very reason.

However, it occurred to me that these external forces might tend to make some of us more conservative than we would have been.  Are you resisting basic curricular changes because of fear … fear that somebody is going to tell you what you are going to do?  Perhaps those of us who have not yet been ‘mandated’ are holding on to our traditional curriculum with a tight grip, although we would be open to basic change if it came from ‘us’.

I encourage you to continue thinking about what the future of college mathematics should look like.  What types of courses do you want?  What should the content be focused on?  What types of support for student learning do you want?  We need to have a vision, an idea about what the future should be, before we can make progress towards achieving that vision.

As part of that process, you might plan ahead for an AMATYC Webinar I am scheduled to deliver (April 3, 2018 at 3pm EDT).  The webinar is entitled “Dev Math: Past, Present, Future”, and my goal is to provide you with some ideas and tools so that you can formulate a clearer vision of what OUR future should look like — at the basic college level as well as pre-college level.  I will share both what my institution is currently doing, and a specific projection to a future state (‘a vision’) for you to consider.  Part of this ‘projection’ is a structure to modernize our STEM mathematics program (especially pre-calculus and the calculus sequence).

If you are not creating our future, you are merely putting up with the future.  Our students depend upon us creating that future in ways that we believe will help them succeed.

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Students at the Center of Learning

“Teaching and Learning” … a phrase often used in professional development for us teachers, as well as in titles of articles and books.  Perhaps a better phrase would be “Learning and Teacher Behaviors”, or “Learning … Teaching without getting in the way!”

I am thinking about how well our Math Literacy course is doing in the Math Lab format.  The Math Lab format creates a learning environment by establishing assignments and a structure for students to work through those assignments.  The instructor ‘stays out of the way’ as long as learning is successful.  This format has been used with very traditional content, and is now being used with a modern developmental course — Math Literacy.

Although some students struggle longer, and do not initially ‘get’ new ideas, the vast majority of students in the Math Lab Math Literacy course have been successful with:

• identifying linear and exponential patterns in sequence
• using dimensional analysis for unit conversions
• identifying the type of calculation for geometry (perimeter, area, volume)
• writing expressions for verbal statements

What’s been tougher?  Anything dealing with percents — applications, simple & compound interest, etc.  Of course, these are weak spots for students in any math class; over the years, I have not seen anything that ‘fixes’ these in the short term; the fix involves unlearning bad or incomplete ideas, and this takes time and long-term ‘exposure’ to errors (along with support from an expert).  Direct instruction or group activities have limited effectiveness against the force of pre-existing bad knowledge.

The instructional materials form the basis for the learning in this Math Lab format.  If the ‘textbook’ is focused on problems to do, contexts to explore, with the expectation that the instructor will provide ‘the mathematics’, then the learner centered approach requires that we use specialized processes in the classroom.  The classroom becomes the focus, and we spend resources & energy on tactical decisions such as ‘homogeneous groupings’ or ‘group responsibilities’ or ‘flipping the classroom’.  The materials we use in this course are well crafted to support learning; the authors ‘expected’ the classroom to be the focus, though our Math Lab ‘classroom’ is working quite well with the materials.

What if we could offer a true “student at the center of learning” design?  Seems to me that this goal would lead us to use methods like our Math Lab, where students interact with the learning materials without an instructor mediating (as much as possible).  Students in our Math Literacy course have been successful in learning new mathematics with decent reasoning skills in this format.  Although initially confusing to students, the classroom is lower stress than a ‘regular’ classroom; there are no artificial social processes used to ‘facilitate’ the learning.  Think of it as being more like a student as an apprentice, where direct engagement with the objects of the occupation is the key for learning.

Of course, we are not normally able to offer all math courses in this format of active learning.  For me, the approach is to design my ‘lecture’ classes to be more like workshops.  In a 2-hour class, I might deliver 45 minutes of very focused presentations (direct instruction) distributed in a deliberate manner through the class time.  The length of ‘lecturing’ is varied according to the course and somewhat according to the needs of the students in a given class.

The point of this post is …

Stay out of the way of learning.

Students can learn by interacting directly with the learning environment.

We want students who are independent, and able to learn without a special structure.  Prepare your students for the real world by creating learning environments where they develop those skills while they are learning mathematics.

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Maybe it’s Not “Men of Color”: Equity in College Mathematics, data part II

A recent post here looked at a summary of pass rates based on “Pell eligibility” and race, where Pell eligibility is used as an indicator of possible poverty.  Take a look at https://www.devmathrevival.net/?p=2791 .  The basic message was that the outcomes for black students was significantly lower and that part of this difference seems related to the impact of poverty.

Today, I wanted to follow that up with some similar data on the role of gender (technically, ‘sex’) in the outcomes of students, accounting for poverty and race.  This seems especially important given the national attention to “men of color” (http://cceal.org/about-cceal/).  As a social justice issue, I agree that this focus on MEN of color is important given the unequal incarceration rates.

However, this is what I see in our data for all Pell eligible students in math courses:

As for the prior chart, this reflects data over a 6 year period … which means that the ‘n’ values for each group are large (up to 10000 for ‘white’).  Given those sample sizes, almost any difference in proportions is statistically significant.  All three comparisons ‘point’ in the same direction — females have higher outcomes than males, within each racial group.

However, notice that the ‘WOMEN” of color have lower outcomes than men “without color”  (aka ‘white’). A focus on men of color, within mathematics education, is not justified by this data.  Here is what I see …

• There is a ‘race thing’ … unequal outcomes for blacks and hispanics, compared to white students.
  [This pattern survives any disaggragation by other factors, such as different courses and indicators of preparation.]
• There is a ‘sex thing’ … unequal outcomes for men, compared to women.
  [This difference is smaller, and does NOT survive some disaggregations.]

There is a large difference in ‘effect size’ for these; the black ‘gap’ in outcomes approaches 20 percentage points (about  2/3 of the white pass rate), while the ‘male’ gap is 5 percentage points or less (90% to 96% of the female pass rate).  In other words, it does not help to be a woman of color; it just hurts less than being a man of color.

I think that pattern fits the social context in the United States.  The trappings of discrimination have been fashioned in to something that looks less disturbing, without addressing the underlying problems.  We have actually retreated in this work, from the period of 40 to 50 years ago; there was a time when college financial aid was deliberately constructed as a tool in this work, and this was effective from the information I have seen.  Current college policies combined with the non-supportive financial aid system results in equity gaps for PEOPLE of color.

Most of us have a small role in this work, but this does not mean the role is unimportant.  If your department and institution are critiquing your impact on people of color, terrific; I hope we have an opportunity to share ideas on solutions.  If your department or institution are not deeply involved in this work, why not?  We have both the professional and moral responsibility to consider the differential impact of our work, including unintended consequences.

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