We have a wonderful Math Department here. We have dedicated and innovative Math faculty who spend their time thinking, planning, implementing, assessing, and revising creative approaches to help all our students succeed in their math courses.
About a year and a half ago I interviewed our Math Department Chair Carolynn Reed for Academic Transfer in Focus. Here’s that interview. But if you’d like to watch something more recent, you can visit this page and scroll down to Getting Along with Math. It’s a lovely view of how one student benefitted from the innovation and commitment of ACC’s Math faculty.
Math is one of the keys to our work in guided pathways. Not all students are in programs where College Algebra is beneficial – many students would benefit much more from taking Statistics or Quantitative Reasoning or Mathematics for Business and Economics. The idea is generally referred to as “math pathways” and is being supported by the Dana Center at The University of Texas. As this site tells us, the goal is to help students succeed in their first college credit math class in their first year of college. And that first class should be the right math class for their learning and career goals. Additionally, it should be a class where the curriculum and pedagogy are informed by research and evidence. As the Dana Center website says, it’s a “joyful conspiracy: ensuring all students benefit from relevant, rigorous mathematics pathways.”
Too many of our students get lost in the maze of developmental math or lecture-based math courses. At ACC we offer something different. We offer corequisites that provide just-in-time-remediation for students. Those corequisites are showing remarkable success rates that are four to six times the rate of the traditional developmental math to credit math course sequence.
We also try to offer clearly delineated math pathways so that students can take the right math class for their needs and aspirations. And we offer individualized help and applied learning structures so that students can see the connections between the math concepts they’re learning and the lives they lead.
And it’s all thanks to our Math Department. Three cheers to our Math folks!
Image by Ciker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.