Math Redesign Means More Student Success

An article in this month's "The Learning MarketSpace," a publication of the National Center for Academic Transformation, offers a fascinating review of a math success story. The article is written by Carol Twigg, who founded the center.

At Jackson State Community College in Tennessee faculty members were fretting about the high failure rates in their remedial and developmental math courses, so the decided to try an experimental redesign of the course.  They really threw out all the rules by consolidating three courses into 12 "modules." Creatively, the faculty members were able to do this without upending the traditional register-for-a-course, take-the-course, get-a-grade-for-the-course administrative structure of college registrars. Students were required to only pass the number of modules deemed necessary for their desired course of study, and could self-pace their work in a math center staffed most of each day.

Success rates are amazing!  You can see the results clearly in the article.Here is an intriguing thought that Twigg writes in the article: "JSCC has decided that it is more important to prepare students to succeed in the future than to remediate the past. That is a decision that every institution struggling with low student success rates in developmental math will need to make." Fasscinating stuff.