Developmental Education Expert Dr. Hunter Boylan Interviews Paul Nolting for the Journal of Developmental Education (Archives 2011)

In a few weeks time, we at the Academic Success Press Blog plan to a publish an extremely exciting interview we conducted last month with renowned learning expert Dr. Hunter R. Boylan. One of our main directives for the upcoming year is to cast a wider net in our coverage of the national math redesign movement. This means putting more of an emphasis on developmental learning and its current standing in the greater world of academia. Dr. Boylan, of course, is one of the leading experts on this front, and he had plenty of interesting things to say on the matter. 

In the meantime, to prepare you for the conversation, we thought we'd share an article published in 2011 in which Boylan himself interviewed Dr. Nolting for the Journal of Developmental Education. The majority of the conversation revolves around the relative ineffectiveness of certain types of developmental mathematics programs, as well as the many ways institutions might fix their problems through a pedagogy dedicated to study skills, anxiety-reduction techniques, and affective characteristics. Nolting also discusses the importance of effective placement strategies, before laying out 10 “common themes” that have helped countless colleges and universities improve their developmental math programs.