The Capabilities of Developmental Students

What are our students capable of?

I think we end up taking a ‘bipolar’ position on this.  On the one hand, we believe that our students can achieve their goals; we encourage them, nudge them, motivate them, and suggest that they might be capable of higher goals.  Our greatest satisfactions come from watching our students — who needed developmental course work — graduate with a completed degree.  Gowns, in college colors, form a visible symbol of this hope for all of our students.

On the other hand, we seem to design courses which say “I get it … you can’t understand mathematics, really; so I will just expect you to recognize some patterns for which you have a solution in memory.”  We build instruction around the goal of maximizing correct answers for students.  We select textbooks which simplify the presentation and provide clear examples of the procedures, and avoid textbooks which discuss the ideas outside of examples.  We observe that our students do not remember much of what they had last semester, and conclude that this reinforces our design of ‘simplify’.

In fact, our ‘simplify design’ paradigm is part of the problem.  As long as learning focuses on remembering procedures, the powerful brain work that enables long-term changes and transfer of learning do not have a chance to occur (except by accident).  In some ways, most of our students leave our classrooms with the same condition that they arrived … summarized by the one word “unable”.

I can not accept the ‘simplify design’ of curriculum due to its message about the capabilities of our students.  Our students are capable of achieving much, and our society actually depends upon them achieving much.  We can not avoid building this capacity within our ‘developmental’ classrooms.  (It’s ironic that we call our courses ‘developmental’ but tend not to develop capacity.) 

Now, I am not under the influence of some ‘just be happy’ medication.  Obviously, students in developmental mathematics classes have some current limitations.  Our response must be to overcome limitations and build capabilities.  This response is not easy, certainly not just ‘pick the best homework system’.  Just like our students, we will achieve more than we thought possible when we face challenges directly.

And, just like our students, we will find the work is easier … and we understand more … when we work with each other.  You are not alone, and we are capable of designing courses which build capacity within our students.

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