Dr. Paul Nolting's Academic Success Press Blog: A Publication Dedicated to Math Success |
Dr. Paul Nolting's Academic Success Press Blog: A Publication Dedicated to Math Success |
Few in the world of college education wear more hats than Dr. Barbara Illowsky. A well-known educator based at De Anza College in Cupertino, California, Illowsky, in addition to her contributions to the national developmental mathematics redesign movement, has also spent years on the vanguard of using modern technology to improve student learning. In 2013, she won the OCW Consortium Educator Award for her decade-long effort to promote open education through her open textbook, Introductory Statistics. We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Illowsky. The first part of the interview involves the history of her open textbook and the future of the textbook industry. Part Two will focus on math redesigns. Enjoy! ASP Blog: How did you get involved with the open textbook movement? Illowsky: The reason I originally got involved with open education resources (OER) was because of the need to save students money. Not just to save them money for the sake of saving money, but because students are not always able to attend college, even when they get tuition waivers and financial aid, because the textbooks are so expensive. I had two incredible mentors in this: my chancellor, Dr. Martha Kanter, who became Undersecretary of Education; and Hal Plotkin, who was our board of trustees. At our district, he was the real force behind [OER] because of his own experiences of not being able to afford text books. Plotkin became senior policy analyst for the Obama administration in the department of education. It really opened my eyes [working for these people], so I began to think, “What can I do to help students?” In California, we accept the top 100 percent of students who apply to college in the community college system. But the issue is, they come, but because financial aid might not come through for two to three weeks, they go two to three weeks without textbooks. Susan Dean, my coauthor, and I, began to wonder what we could do to make a big difference from our end. I couldn’t change financial aid, I couldn’t change tuition, I couldn’t change whether or not someone needs childcare, but what I could do was make sure students did not need to pay for a statistics textbook. We were really in the right place at the right time. Our book became an open education resource. What this means is that even before day one, students can go online and get the whole textbook. They don’t have to wait two weeks. They don’t have to decide whether or not their children will go on a field trip versus the cost of a textbook. They don’t have to use their GI-bill funding for it. The book is free. ASP Blog: What were your initial experiences with offering your book as an open education resource? It must have been scary relinquishing control over your work. Illowsky: Freedom was behind all of this: access to the book from day one. What ended up happening over the years—I’ve been involved since 2005 or so—the book started getting better. The people who used it made suggestions. Through the Rice University Connexions platform, and now through OpenStax College, we were able to pick and choose what we wanted to incorporate into the book. Users could then customize the book. All they had to do was give us attribution for the first book. Or if it was something we thought might improve the textbook from our end, we could immediately make changes. We did this many times. A professor at another university even wrote a 1,000 question test bank to go along with it. Someone else created PowerPoints to go along with it—so we got this huge community of people around the country that wanted to share different parts. This led to a much better textbook, and it also led to innovation. The for-profits became involved with this because it had a creative commons attribution license. This meant that for-profits did not have to pay to use the book. Publishers and bookstores could print the book without paying a fee. Some people say, of course, “Why would you allow a company to make money off of your book when you don’t?” The first for-profit that I personally became involved with was WebAssign. I was at AMATYC and doing the very first presentation on open textbooks. The room was packed. It was greatly received, but several people said to me, “This would be great and I would use this, but all of the for-profits have homework grading systems with their books.” So I went down, and I was in the vendor area, and I met with WebAssign. I asked them if they had ever considered doing a homework system for an open textbook. They didn’t know what an open textbook was. They looked into it, and they decided to get into that market. Mine was their first open textbook; now they have a few others. They worked really well with me. I thought I was doing this just as a way to get homework graded quickly. As it turned out, the more I used WebAssign, the more I found out it was helping students to increase their learning because it wasn’t just grading yes and no questions. It actually involved a learning system. Students do pay for this—about $30—but the book is free, and I give them the option. Almost all of the students do it though, because of the feedback potential. Another example is that Apple made an iBook with it. This allows students to pay $4.99 for the book to use on their iPad or phone. They can highlight with their finger, and they can do assessment that doesn’t come to me. They can know if they are getting things right or wrong. This is an improvement of learning—and all of this does not require a student to pay, it just gives them more options. ASP Blog: How are people using your book? I imagine by offering it for free and allowing users to adjust the text to their own needs, your book is used in radically different ways in radically different places. Illowsky: A school in Sweden took one chapter and used it for their doctoral psychology program because it explains a concept that wasn’t in their other textbook. A dental school on the East Coast used the book in a similar way. Students in a dental program do not need to spend their money on an entire statistics textbook—especially when they only need one chapter. Once, a few high schools students in an AP statistics course wrote to me to tell me that they were using the open videos I made to go along with the textbook. Their teacher, who did not really know statistics, used the videos and learned along with the students. Because they were free and creative commons licensed, they were able to do that. ASP Blog: I'm curious, how do you think open textbooks will affect the future of college learning? What you are describing here is a totally malleable and adaptable text. This is something that was not possible until the last ten years. In one way, then, open textbooks would seem to represent the future, in that you can create intellectual property that will organically evolve through collective use. But will we ever, as a collective culture, be able to get past the desire to make money off of educational texts? Illowsky: What I can tell you is that we DID make money off of the original book. It started off as a for-profit book (though it was affordably priced). We sold it to the bookstores for $38 and they sold it for $50. As for the open book, a foundation bought the copyright from us and donated it to Rice University with the idea of us giving up all future royalties. We gave it all up, but we did receive a one-shot payment. Still, this is different from the traditional model. I just read about a Harvard professor who made $42 million off an economic textbook in one year. He was defending that, and I’m not going to say anything about that one way or the other, but I really feel that getting paid for the work once is enough. I don’t need to get paid every year for work I did ten years ago. The bigger and better part of this is that I feel really good. Students have come up to me and told me that they probably would have dropped a course without the book. We all get paid for our work. I get paid for teaching. I go around and speak at colleges and conventions. But the idea that we have established a collective community of sharing is [worth more than money]. The faculty who have made the test banks and PowerPoints see this as a part of their professional responsibility. I have not made money off of the book for more than ten years, but I still want to work on improving it because I think that it is important. ASP Blog: Before we wrap up this first part of our talk, I'd like to ask you about any links between open textbooks and developmental education. Are there any open developmental math books? Illowsky: Sure. There are a lot of open textbooks at the developmental education level. I have been working with faculty on adopting free and open developmental textbooks, and I also want to add low-cost, because there are some companies that have textbooks for $30 or so. This is fine; they are paying their employees to work after all. Free is ideal, but $30 or $40 is not the same as $250 for a one-semester course. ASP Blog: This is all particularly interesting because the textbook industry is completely in flux right now. Publishers are having to come to terms with the changing expectations of students and changing university expectations—what people are willing to spend and what they are willing to spend it on. Many are struggling to adapt. Illowsky: I think that publishers do a good service. But compare a mass market paperback book that costs $15.99—for which a whole series of people are getting paid to write, review, and edit—then compare this to a college textbook at $200. I would be thrilled if all of the major publishers were able to work out their business plans so that they could make money, and faculty could make money, but their costs were low enough that students could access them on day one, and not come out of school in debt or drop classes. Click here to read Part Two of our conversation with Barbara Illowsky.
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ASP Blog: How can colleges determine what types of students belong in what types of courses. Is it a matter of assessment?
Goosen: Universities have an advantage here because they usually bring students in for several days of orientation. In that time, they have the ability to [assess and get to know students]. Community colleges usually, if they have orientation, have four hours for orientation. Often, what happens is, the first day students are in class, most instructors can pick out who has no clue about what they’ve said over the last hour. At San Jacinto, we do some assessment. What has happened in Texas is that our state has required that we do a pre-assessment activity. At my institution, we developed our own guide. We don’t have the education planners or the faculty advisors to spend a lot of time with these students, but our guide does feature non-cognitive questions. Things like, “What was the last math class you took?” Or, “Do you enjoy math?” Or, “How many hours do you work per week, and does your boss mind you being here?” Or, “How are you getting here, do you have reliable transportation?” Some of these questions give us insight into who these students are. For those students who say, “I have always hated math,” you aren’t going to put them into an accelerated pathway right away. We recruit for these pathways from our beginning classes. Instructors know [capable students]. They have an idea of who should go into what pathway because they’ve had a chance to work with the students. They have seen their work, they know them, they’ve had conversations with them, and we can then determine where they go. The important piece around that: we had a movement for a while that said, “Let’s do everything online. Let’s register them online, let’s advise them online, etc.” The problem with that was that the students we see need to know a face. They need personal interaction. That is why our Intentional Connections program is working because students see faces, and they go back to these faces, and they meet several people who can help them every semester. They don’t just visit an education planning office. Individual students always have the same faculty advisor, and they know who that advisor is, and they feel confident in what that person is going to tell them. We have many good advisors in our education planning center, but you always get a different one when you walk in the door. Consistency connects students to an institution. The repetitiveness of hearing, “You belong here, and here are the resources that can help you,” helps students get to where they need to go. It is more than whatever they got on a test score. Some schools have figured out how to give non-cognitive tests. They do use those in placement. We have more of a relaxed way to do it, but I think that it does get to the heart of who a student is rather than having him take an assessment that may or may not work. ASP Blog: What is it that has decreased the amount of face-to-face interaction in colleges? Is it that policymakers are worried about logistical issues, or is it some weird fear of defying modernity or something? It seems fairly obvious that students would benefit from personal attention. Goosen: It is mainly an economic thing. That’s just my opinion. It costs money to have people sitting in your advising center. Quite honestly, our students don’t typically go to the advising center. You have peak times, like right now, I’m sure there is a line outside of our advising center. But then what do you do a few weeks into the semester and everybody is enrolled? What do you do with all of these people that theoretically don’t have a job? You have to figure out what to do with them. We have integrated them into our instructional piece. They come to all of our student success courses, they are doing presentations, and they are reconnecting with students. We give them a job once they get students into classes. They are a part of what we are doing all year. Part of it is logistics. We don’t have enough advisors. We bring in 5,000 new students, not including returning students. That is a huge number of people. So we are trying to be more efficient about it. If you are new to our school and you are a developmental student who is forced into education planning, how we get around that is, they have to register during orientation. We take them into the lab and we register them. Many schools are doing this, and it is a really good technique. Get them for orientation, explain everything, take them into a lab and help them register. They still register on computers, but to have a person sitting next to you and help you through it, that becomes a huge part of this. Bottom line, it is personnel and people intensive. It costs money. Our state has, and most states have, cut budgets. [Our budget] used to be about 60% [from the state] and now we are down to 30%. Everything else is through tuition and property tax. So you try to be economical. Computers are cheaper. Still, students need to connect with someone at the institution. Quite honestly, this is usually the instructor in the classroom. Who do they see more? They go to orientation, and they see the lovely girl standing in front of the room, and they may never see her again. They don’t know her name. But when they go to the classroom two or three times a week, [the teacher] is the person that they come to know. I’m lucky that I work at an institution where the two sides have figured out how to do all of this [administrative and instructional]. It is not us against them. It is us together, trying to help students succeed. A lot of schools just don’t have the money to [pull this off]. ASP Blog: Is there any hope that budgets will some day increase, or is it more productive to learn how to thrive in this new status quo? You go anywhere, and you hear that college is expensive. And it is, and prices have gone up. I think community colleges are an economical oasis in a lot of places. My brother sent his kids to out of state Big 10 schools, then he figured out that the community college would have given him a better education cheaper. I kind of laughed when he told me that. Understanding that the education students receive at community colleges is quality is important. Students aren’t put in classes with 500 students. Teachers know their names. But having said all of that, I think there is a big push in the U.S. about how expensive college is. I don’t see the states contributing any more. I think the policymakers have been very effective in how they have influenced this agenda that developmental education is costing schools a lot. Most students who go to college are in the upper quartile economically. There is not a lot of room for growth there. Where there is room for growth is in the lower two quartiles of economic situations. They don’t have a lot of money to go to college. That is where colleges is where students are going to have to pull from to increase the number of workers we need, the number of students we need getting degrees and certificates. I don’t see that happening in the present economic situation. I don’t think a lot of people understand this. Hello Readers! We at Academic Success Press hope you had a blessed holiday break! To get the New Year off to a great start, we thought we'd begin by publishing an interview we conducted last summer with Dr. Rebecca Goosen. One of our country's foremost experts on developmental education, Goosen is the Associate Vice-Chancellor and Dean of College Preparatory at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas. During her 16-year stay at San Jacinto, she has helped her student body—largely comprised of first-generation college students from educationally disadvantaged backgrounds—improve math success rates from 15% to 50%. Dr. Goosen has also served as the President Elect for the National Association of Developmental Education. This conversation is particularly interesting as it provides great insight into the thought processes of a faculty-minded administrator who is not afraid to try out new initiatives in order to improve the success and experiences of her students. Check back on Wednesday for the continuation of our talk. (Photo taken from San Jacinto's Website). Academic Success Press Blog: To start us off, would you mind describing your general goals for San Jacinto College—and particularly for your developmental education programs?
Goosen: Many of our students come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. For a lot of our students, their only access to education is through us. They are not typically coming directly out of high school. If students [in our town] say they are going to college, most often they are referring to us. So we have a huge challenge here. Our students come from poor backgrounds, poor high schools. We see many first-generation Americans. We really have to focus on what they need. Things are not suggested at San Jacinto, they are mandated. Nobody is allowed in a class after it has met the first time. We have no late payments. We have a mandatory student success course. Everybody takes that course and has to reenroll until they pass it. This really helps students understand the campus and college systems. We have so many first generation students; they don’t really understand how to traverse the institution. When you say, "go to the registrar office," they have no idea what you are talking about. We also have mandatory reading courses. Reading is important in whatever subjects students go into. Once you start your reading and writing sequence, you move forward and take it every semester until you complete the sequence. It is the same with mathematics. We have switched over to integrated learning and writing; students take the subjects together. For the very low-level students, the state of Texas has put a floor into developmental education. Students who are just below that floor—they have a high school diploma—we put them in a program called Intentional Connections. These students are put into a learning community with an independent reading class and independent writing class. They are presented with all of the career paths we have here, and they leave with an individual education plan of their choosing. This has been extremely successful. We are seeing 90% of these students still in school at the end of the semester. We have only been doing this for four years, but people are beginning to emerge on the other side with credentials and jobs in the workplace. ASP: Wow. So your approach seems to be intentionally rigid in some ways, though it also allowing students to obtain skills that will fit their own individual needs. The keys here seem to be structure and efficacy. This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with Hunter Boylan. We discussed the false premise that developmental education is inherently ineffective. When developmental education programs fail, some people blame developmental education itself, rather than faulty individual courses or systems. There has been at least some chatter about getting rid of developmental education altogether. This is the case in Texas as well, correct? Goosen: (Laughs). Yes. That's a big deal in Texas. Our governing board has brought in various initiatives who see us as a problem. There are two definitions of what [these people] talk about. They talk about "remedial education," and they use that term incorrectly. Remedial education is a series of classes taught independently, which hopes students merely get through [on their way to credited courses]. I would agree that remediating classes in that matter does not work. Developmental education is much more than that. It is an integration of services, classes, and support systems. It is paying attention to exactly what students need and who the students are. Developmental education actually works. What we have done here [at San Jacinto], is to look holistically at students. When you are trying to teach a factoring problem, and you notice a student in the back of the class is sleeping, you might not realize that he has worked until eight in the morning, and he is sitting in your nine a.m. class. Or he is sitting there, and he is worried about his sick child at home. Or he just got evicted. Or someone has told him that he isn't college material. Of course he isn't worried about the factoring problem at this point. The people who have figured out how to help these students all focus on the entire student. Support mechanisms are crucial. [The student mentioned before] needs online tutoring. He might need to do his homework at 10 at night—a time when no one will be at the school to tutor him. So how can we provide support mechanisms for these students to become successful? There are several issues here. One, many colleges have not invested money into developmental programs. They have invested into other programs they believe are more valuable. Many of the schools have not invested in the kind of support systems that students need to make them stay in school. A lot of the accelerated programs—there is nothing wrong with them—but the problem that I see, is that we need more research about which model works for which student. Generally, you can’t say that every student will flourish in an emporium model or accelerated model. That is where it becomes tricky. When we start talking about individual students, with a face, with a name, with a background—it becomes much more complicated. ASP: Who exactly is misunderstanding the distinction between remedial and developmental education? Goosen: Policy makers across the U.S. There is a whole list of them. People with good intentions. They see developmental education as a barrier. They want to reduce the cost for students. They want them to get to credited classes more quickly. But there is a fundamental issue here. The state of Florida recently began putting students in college algebra with what they call “a little bit of support.” They don’t really define what “a little bit of support” actually means. They have found out that this “little bit of support” needs to be better defined—and for that matter it needs to be a little more than a “little bit of support.” In Texas, we are trying to better prepare students in high school. This is a challenge because high school administrations have different ideas about what students need than universities and colleges. In Texas, [high schools and colleges] have different governing boards. They are trying to work together, and they are trying to make this transition seamless, but we each have different pressures coming from the state. This makes this a lot more complicated. If we could fix that, then we would fix a whole bunch of stuff. What developmental education really focuses on is that 25 year old who has been out of school for six or seven years and has forgotten how to do certain math or maybe never really knew how to write an acceptable essay. It is much easier to get these students up and running in a short amount of time than someone who has come out of public schools at 18 and really has not mastered the math and English concepts that we need them to have to get them at the college-level. These students are much more of a challenge. ASP: Many of these new redesigned math courses involve placing students in front of a computer with little instruction or help. How do you think these courses have affected developmental education across the country? Goosen: I think that some of it is good; again, if you can identify the student who belongs in this type of system. There is another piece to this too: the instructors. We have accelerated models at my institution that are working very well because the faculty that are teaching them are excellent. If you decide to move to modular courses, then you need enough teachers who are good at teaching this way. There are some people, I don’t care how much professional development you give them, that will never be really good at teaching some of these models. It is important to figure out what student belongs in what program. If you want to be general about developmental students, they tend to be the most unmotivated. They are not self-directed; they are not self-correcting. They are intimidated by being in college; they are intimidated about their actual abilities. They need structure. At my institution, the online instructors who have a lot of success have a lot of structure in their courses. There are no soft deadlines. Students have things they need to do by a certain time. They are held accountable. When you don’t know how to be a student, we train you how to be a student. When we look at developmental education, we have overrepresentation from students who come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. At the same time, we kind of assume that all of these students are plugged in. While everyone has a cellphone, at home many of these students still have dialup. They don’t have computer proficiency. So I’m not sure that every student coming into our institution has the computer savvy to do well in some of these programs. We have some students who can, but there again it becomes about figuring out who can flourish in modular courses. ASP: From an administrative viewpoint, what do faculty members need to do to convince you that certain redesigns or changes to courses are actually capable of improving student success? Goosen: (Laughs). I’m probably not the average administrator when it comes to this. I give my faculty a lot of license. They are the experts. I am here just to support them with what they need: the space, the funds, those kinds of things. When they come to me with an idea, I usually ask them two questions. First, what will the change do for students’ experiences? Will it improve their lives, will it improve their educational experience? The second question is always, "how much is it going to cost me?" We look at data a lot, and we look at it in a lot of different ways. Historically, has someone done this before, and what were the success rates? How are they getting this success rate? Often, numbers are interesting but there is usually a backstory at work. What works at San Jacinto College might not work at El Paso. So, what are the parameters around a particular initiative? Who is teaching these courses, what types of students are they working with? What sort of skills are students entering the course with? When you try a new initiative, you better understand the pedagogy behind it, because if it fails or if it succeeds you need to understand why you got these results. I have sent probably more people to the Kellogg Institute than anybody else in the U.S., but I need these people to understand the pedagogical framework of what they want to do. I need to make sure they aren’t making a change solely based upon the idea that someone else did something somewhere else. We try lots of things here. If it doesn’t work the first time, we revisit it. We retool it, we adapt it. Sometimes we walk away. But the faculty must have ownership [in these initiatives]. Teachers must believe in what they are doing and understand that [an initiative] may not wind up looking like how they thought it up—that it will evolve and become a good product for students (and not necessarily just for teachers). Here again one question continuously rises to the surface: what is this initiative going to do to help students become more successful? Click here for part two. NADE and AMATYC have joined together again to sponsor the second pre-conference National Math Summit. The Summit will take place before the NADE conference on Tuesday, March 15 at 1:00 PM (Anaheim, CA).
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN for $75 www.nade.net The Summit will feature nearly all of the individuals we have interviewed for this blog. Don't miss your chance to interact with some of the country's leading experts on math learning and math redesigns! Sign up soon! Spots will fill up quickly! Hello readers! We just wanted to let you know that we are going to take a brief three week hiatus for the holidays. When we return, you can expect interviews with many more experts, including: Tanya Paul (former NADE President) and Barbara Illowsky (renowned math redesign expert). We will also continue to aggregate material from around the Web about mathematics and mathematics learning.
In the meantime, feel free to read a few of the other interviews we've already conducted with some of the nation's leading experts. For your convenience, we have compiled them on the sidebar underneath the "Blog Highlights" subheading on the right-hand side of the page. Happy reading and happy holidays! ASP Blog: Can you briefly describe AMATYC’s New Life Project? What exactly does it aim to accomplish?
Rotman: There are several things involved in the work. One, the specific curricular model, which involves the long-term replacement of any algebra course or pre-algebra course before college level with two courses: mathematics literacy and algebraic literacy. The content is all derived from what research shows students actually need. Most of it deals with fundamental ideas of math—all interesting stuff to teach. Another dimension involves bringing a bunch of things together that have been piling around in different places. There has been a lot of good work done on pedagogy and on research. We are trying to disseminate this information the best we can and embed it in our work. We are working on things like student motivation and development for success in college. When we first started, we had this nice model for our math literacy course, which had layers: content in the middle, a layer for assessment, a layer for pedagogy, a layer for student support. The name, by the way, comes from the fact that most people in developmental mathematics five or six years ago were very discouraged. This was before the state mandates and these big [negative] reports. Conferences were full of conversations about how to improve anything in developmental mathematics. I often say that we were discouraged and desperate people. So we developed this New Life name to let people know that this is something they can get excited about—something that can bring some excitement back to the professional life you once had, instead of being so discouraged. We don’t do motivational speaking, but we do try to present things in a way that gives people hope for something better. In some ways, we are countervails to these heavy-handed state efforts to control our work. ASP Blog: How much does New Life differ from what the people at the Carnegie Foundation and the Dana Center are doing? Rotman: There is a lot of overlap between the three efforts. In 2009, we collaborated with the Carnegie Foundation and participated in some meetings to finalize their corresponding course. This is essentially our math literacy course with a few changes—mostly a matter of their network improvement community and their materials. So the content is similar. They share the same interests that we do in research, pedagogy, and student support. At that same time the Dana Center was also developing their curriculum. Since that time, they have gone on their own path with Pathways and Mathways. These three efforts are largely networked together. All of them are generally doing similar things in different ways meant to meet different needs. The Carnegie Foundation is interested in colleges, college systems, and working together in their network. The Dana Center is interested in getting states to do things statewide. AMATYC picks up just about everything else: people who don’t have a state system or have a college that won’t do something systematically. No states have to do the New Life project. Those that are participating choose to. New Life Project focuses specifically on math faculty. We get them excited about doing their work. ASP Blog: How do these three reforms compare to past reforms—specifically those that promoted accelerated courses and the emporium model? Rotman: The reforms you just mentioned mostly address the delivery system of what we’ve been doing. They make things more efficient, or get more students to pass—but they don’t change the mathematics involved. They still involve the same uninteresting and un-empowering math. That’s one difference Another is that most of our work is on the relationship between mathematics professionals and students, whether face-to-face or online. These other efforts often minimize these relationships. We think that it really helps to have a personal connection. Professors need to understand what students need on a personal level. ASP Blog: So how can institutions determine what specific types of math redesigns work for what specific types of students? Rotman: I have to say, I’m definitely biased here. If colleges want to do what is best for students, they will as quickly as possible replace their entire developmental mathematics curriculum with something like one of [the three models mentioned in the previous question}. Which one they pick depends upon their environment. If they can make systematic changes, then the Dana Center and Carnegie Foundation plans would work. If they can’t, then they can use New Life. You get similar results from all three of these programs. That is my advice: you have to get rid of what you have been doing because there is no place in the country where the old stuff is actually helping students. There are places where pass rates are getting higher, but that doesn’t mean that the work is actually helping students learn math. ASP Blog: How important are pass rates? If they are important, then is there a specific number we should shoot for? People have floated around a 70 percent goal. Rotman: By themselves, success rates aren’t enough. If we are offering good curriculum, and we have pass rates that are that high, then we are getting close to where we should be. The point is, if we get pass rates around 75 percent in traditional courses, then we are still failing because that math isn’t useful to many students—it doesn’t help them think better, it doesn’t give them the skills they need, it doesn’t really enable them to do much at all. In many ways, in traditional courses we see students at the end looking a lot like the students at the beginning, just with a few more skills. I want to fundamentally change students: make them more enabled, more powerful, and have more options. ASP Blog: Is there anything else you’d like to discuss? Rotman: One more thing that is worth pointing out is that in the New Life Project, we essentially want to ban courses on arithmetic in colleges. There are lots of surveys that show very little mathematics is needed for occupations. Most of these surveys are based on the algebra and arithmetic topics we have traditionally taught. The arithmetic that has been taught in the past, if you update the ideas, you get closer to a mathematics literacy course. There are very few numerical skills that you need to teach before a literacy course. To think that you need to teach students to do things like divide decimals by hand—none of these things help students for more than a few weeks. They’ll pass their classes, then immediately forget everything and have nothing to show for their work. As promised, here is Part One of our interview with AMATYC's Jack Rotman! A developmental math teacher for more than forty years, Rotman has worked with AMATYC in various positions since 1987. He currently runs the New Life Project—"a national effort to develop a new model for developmental mathematics." This first portion of our conversation covers many topics, but we mostly speak about his response to Complete College America's infamous "Bridge to Nowhere" findings, as well as Rotman's thoughts on the joys and pleasures of mathematics. Part Two—scheduled to run this Wednesday—focuses predominately on the New Life Project. Note that we spoke with Rotman before AMATYC 2015. For more on Rotman's thoughts about the "Bridge to Nowhere," click on this link, which will take you to an AMATYC powerpoint presentation that addresses the topic. ASP Blog: At AMATYC 2015, you plan to give a speech that directly responds to Complete College America's assertion that developmental math (and all remediation) serves as a "bridge to nowhere." What compelled you to respond? Rotman: It is risky that they are using data to backup predetermined positions. It’s a pretty awful use of data. Overall, the data does show problems; however, I don’t know about all developmental education, but certainly in mathematics, [this bad data is not caused by] nature but by design. Many developmental courses are simply copied from elsewhere and then misused. Our work [at AMATYC] is all about deciding what students actually need at the college level—whether its mathematics, science, or technology, then building courses from these things rather than merely copying a high school course and calling it good enough for college. One of the things they say in “The Bridge to Nowhere” report is that students come to college expecting college level courses not high school courses—well, I actually agree with that. It is important to give students the college experience, even if they need to do something prior to normal college work. So, our courses are at a somewhat higher level cognitively than traditional developmental math courses. This is one of the problems that we see in our traditional work—it is so procedural and memory based that students don’t get any preparation for the bigger challenges they face in college-level work. ASP Blog: I know another thing you are passionate about involves the math teachers themselves. We focus so much on students—and justifiably so—that sometimes we don't stop to think that teachers might do a better job if they too were genuinely engaged with the content they teach. Can you discuss this? Rotman: One of the things I used to work on was getting mathematicians excited about teaching mathematics. The traditional work in college—especially in developmental and college algebra—has been ruined in some ways. It isn’t as exciting as many professionals want it to be. You want to teach something you feel good about—not simply trinomials or how to solve an eight-step rational equation. Those are things we want students to be able to do when needed, but they are not things that make teachers wake up in the morning and say, “Oh, I can’t wait to teach that today.” The human mind is naturally curious about how things fit together. It’s not that we have to convince students that mathematics is interesting or not interesting. If we present something that we are genuinely excited about—most students respond to that. Right now, it is hard for students to get excited about traditional curriculum because it is the same stuff that they had before that wasn’t useful the first time they saw it. ASP Blog: So you are saying that teachers need to get excited about their work and students need to better understand the context of what they are learning? Rotman: This is difficult to articulate accurately. Some people hear me talk and come away thinking, "Jack is all for teaching everything within context.” Other people hear me talk, and they think I’m saying that context is irrelevant. The truth is somewhere in between. My own background isn’t so much in mathematics as it is in educational psychology. I’ve been reading research for forty years. In all of that reading I’ve never seen any research that shows teaching math in context actually improves learning—it improves motivation, but it can actually harm learning if you are not careful. That is true for most things that we do. It is easier to harm learning than it is to enable it. When people teach fully from context, they often limit the mathematics they teach to what students can understand at that specific time. I feel really bad about that because if I can’t get a student at least interested in learning mathematics for its own sake, I haven’t shown them what a mathematician is, I’ve just showed them how you use mathematics. These are not the same thing. When students pass through one of my math classes, I want them to at least get an inkling that the material is something that somebody gets interested in by itself. Even if we can’t apply it right now, this math is something that can be fun for the next sixteen weeks. I like context—but I never stay there very long. I start with context in my classes—I usually teach something simple, then bring it into context, then go into something more mathematical. This involves a kind of a dance around context, not a long term stay. ASP Blog: That is so interesting! I can see how someone who is passionate about math, someone who genuinely finds it fun, would almost resent the idea that math is some sort of pill hidden in peanut butter that one tries to force down the throat of a sick dog. If you genuinely care about math, I can see how this approach might come across insulting. Rotman: Mathematics has always been this amazing and awkward mixture of practical and unpractical. The interesting thing is that some math that was useless twenty years ago is now a matter of national security or enables a business to survive or enables a company to produce something. Today’s useless mathematics is tomorrows economy. You never know. So do we really want to say to students, “I am only going to teach you what you can use today, which is actually what you could have used two years ago.” We are never completely up to date. When they need something in five years, students will have no idea what they should be looking for. When people think of math, they usually think only of arithmetic then useless things that don’t apply to life. [This binary] bothers me a lot. History is full of mathematics being embedded in practical things as well as being an abstract pursuit for its own merit. That’s true for most sciences—all of them are like that. The arts too. There are two dimensions in math. You can’t teach just one and lose track of the other. ASP Blog: You’ve basically just described a paradox. Math is perpetually useful and un-useful—and neither of these categories is fixed. Rotman: Right. The whole world is a paradox in some ways, from top to bottom. There are days that everything makes sense, but more often than not, there are things that don’t quite fit together. Click here for Part Two.
Good morning readers! Today, we want to update you about what you can expect to see on the blog in the upcoming weeks. Then we'll pass along a few interesting links to recent stories from around the Web involving developmental mathematics.
Updates 1. On Monday, Nov. 30 we will run an interview with Jack Rotman (AMATYC). Not only do we discuss math redesigns in the conversation, but we also talk about the reputation of math itself. Is math something students should "just get over with?" Are real world applications necessary to truly make mathematics valuable to students? We talk about this and much more. 2. We also have upcoming interviews with Rebecca Goosen and Barbara Illowsky. Stay tuned! Links 1. An interesting piece from Mercer County Community College's student newspaper. The story discusses the headaches of implementing computer-based programs into redesigned classrooms. Spoiler alert! Some of the students are a bit frustrated (shocking, we know)! Link 2. Another extremely interesting read about the efforts of a few NC State professors to find new and innovative ways to teach math. It is always exciting when math departments receive grants to conduct this type of research. Good luck to all involved! Link Good morning readers! The Washington Post, yesterday, published an article on its website that featured a really interesting post from the City University of New York's Math Blog. Written by Jonathan Cornick last April, the piece describes the author's experiences teaching developmental math and college algebra courses. In his effort to find out how, exactly, his friends and family use math in their everyday lives, Cornick grapples with the now age-old debate over the necessity of college algebra. He also briefly explains CUNY's recent experimentation with Carnegie's Statway and Quantway designs. The teacher then provides what he believes to be the answer for students struggling with algebra: I believe that we must continue to design and implement alternative pathways in mathematics to better serve the students who traditionally get stuck in remediation; Either through alternative remediation, or preferably in mainstreaming those students into an existing credit-bearing Quantitative Reasoning or Statistics course with extra support for their basic skills. These courses should be supported by proven pedagogy and contextualization of the topics. Here is a link to the original article: http://cunymathblog.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2015/04/24/math-you-use/
It is definitely worth a read. Hello! For today's post, we wanted to update our readers on Paul's schedule for AMATYC 2015. In addition to manning the Academic Success Press Booth (#311), Paul will also give a presentation titled: Integrating Math Study Skills: Classroom, Modular, and Online Approaches. The presentation is scheduled for Saturday between 10:30 and 11:45 a.m. For more information, see the promotional material below. This workshop demonstrates how to integrate math study skills into classroom, modular, emporium, and online courses by teaching students reading, homework, memory, note-taking, test-taking, anxiety reduction and motivational skills. It will also help faculty learn how to use modern technology, including phone and tablet applications, to help their students become better independent learners. The discussion will then move on to our new Academic Success Press math success blog, which features numerous interviews with national experts, including many who will present at the NADE/AMATYC National Math Summit in March. The blog is intended to establish a meeting ground for those working in the world of mathematics education. It features articles on recent events, research, and prominent individuals in the field. (continued on back of page) |
AuthorDr. Nolting is a national expert in assessing math learning problems, developing effective student learning strategies, assessing institutional variables that affect math success and math study skills. He is also an expert in helping students with disabilities and Wounded Warriors become successful in math. He now assists colleges and universities in redesigning their math courses to meet new curriculum requirements. He is the author of two math study skills texts: Winning at Math and My Math Success Plan. Blog HighlightsAmerican Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges presenter, Senior Lecturer-Modular Reader Contributions
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