Read two developmental ed articles today. First the awful one: ECS Sharing - MeasuringCoreqSuccess_CCA_final.pdf - All Documents (sharepoint.com)
This is from exactly the same folks who proudly posted that alternatives to developmental math could help *as many as half* of the students placing there. Perfectly happy that it doesn't help most of them. I can't figure out whether they don't understand the basic math, or they think most of the other half are unworthy, or both.
To explain the success, they say that if you have a college course w/ co-req, and students are taking them both at the same time... and *assuming* 80% pass rate (trust, me that is NOT typical)... that gosh, golly!!! In bold print 80 out of 100 students will pass college level math in a year.
Erm, since they're taking that class in a semester, what the article basically did was just explain what "80%" means.
It really galls me that they don't talk about the MAJOR challenges of putting together a good co-req program -- if you do it right, with the right people, it works, but ... most of 'em aren't done that way. I'm not sure whether it galls me more or less that they contrive these "explanations" so absurdly. It definitely galls me that it's not obvious to others how absurd it is.
But as soon as I finished that, a student approached me with "this might be a dumb question" -- trying to figure out for a powerpoint presentation how long they'd have to spend on each slide. I do *not* know if they just wanted to know or if they had to include that information, but they *really wanted to understand* how to figure it out and why 0.29 minutes wasn't basically 30 seconds. I *think* I conveyed -- explaining that the .29 was 29 out of a hundred, and seconds were out of 60, and then gestured to make a clock face (mentally noting they might not look at analog clocks often) and that if I put the *clock* into 10 chunks, each chunk would be 6 seconds, not 10.
No, this student would *not* be all that well served by "corequisites."
YEs, I wanted to make a "quick snip" explanation with good visuals, and perhaps a "how does this connect to even more abstract proportional reasoning" lesson...
Comments
Susan, I can't access the article(s) but I would REALLY like to read it/them. I teach developmental math classes at a community college in Minneapolis, and I think the classes work! I have been doing it for 9 years, and most of the students are SO appreciative that we start at the very beginning with the basics and help build their mathematical understand (and confidence) to the point that they are ready for beginning algebra after a semester in the classes I teach. For those who stick with it, these classes are transformational in that they turn people who always thought (and have been told) that they were bad at math into people who actually enjoy problem solving and are successful at it.