Curriculum Branch: Basic Skills: In the spring, the Math DE Committee offered a series of four Basic Skills retreats with the goal of analyzing our current arithmetic courses and making a recommendation for updating these courses to reflect the Math DE Program Student Learning Outcomes and better serving our students. We currently offer five different arithmetic courses, each originally designed to address the needs of specific populations. Eight faculty attended the retreats, four of whom were adjuncts. They identified the following problems:

 

After interviewing faculty teaching in occupational programs, reviewing the math components of several certification and job-training entrance exams, and discussing how the Math DE Program SLOs could be achieved through an arithmetic course, the group recommended that the department

 

Given that in Fall 09 Math 15 will no longer qualify as a course that is sufficient for the AA degree requirement, it is questionable as to the future usefulness of this course.

 

With respect to the objective of evaluating lab services, we conducted a math lab usage study to determine if students of color used lab services at rates comparable to white students. The data was shared with both the campus DE Committee and the Math Department with the goal of identifying areas of concern and developing action plans. Lab usage did not vary significantly by ethnicity, though we noticed that a smaller percentage of African American students who used the lab became moderate or heavy users. We plan to conduct another study to ascertain why students who are light users of the lab do not become moderate or heavy users.

 

With respect to the objective of working with faculty to integrate lab services into instruction, we conducted a flex activity in which instructors worked in groups to analyze data connected to math lab usage, such as headcount, number of visits, and average length of a visit. Since the data showed a wide variation in lab usage for different sections of the same course, we asked instructors to share strategies for getting students to the lab.

 

Several members of the Math DE Committee participated in planning sessions for the MESA grant. Tue is teaching in the AVID Learning Community and attended an AVID conference.

 

 

We built on the work of a SP 06 Prealgebra Teaching Community, which is documented in the website http://www.cfkeep.org/html/stitch.php?s=21223071051038&id=58310652392274. After reading LiPing Ma’s Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, the SP 06 Teaching Community developed an appreciation for the conceptual richness of arithmetic and a realization that that we needed to do more to understand these concepts before we could teach them effectively. So in SP 07 and Fall 07 we sponsored weekly meetings for a group of seven instructors, two of whom were adjuncts, to read and discuss Susan Lamon’s Teaching Fractions and Ratios for Understanding. For the first month we had the instructors do think-alouds with problems from the book, with the caveat that they could not resort to algorithms to solve the problems. This forced instructors to think about the concepts and to analyze their own reasoning. This introductory exercise brought many previously unexamined arithmetic reasoning skills to light. Each instructor then took responsibility for leading the discussion on an assigned chapter and produced the following:

 

(1)   Summary of the key ideas from the chapter.

(2)   Set of problems that address the key ideas (perhaps drawing heavily from the problem sets in the chapter but changing contexts to adult settings).

(3)   Snapshot of Math 12 students’ thinking relative to the ideas in the chapter.

·   Identify one assessment problem that reflects the key points (perhaps just use the opening problem from the chapter);

·   Give the problem to prealgebra students and analyze their responses;

·   Compare our prealgebra student responses to the examples of student work in the chapter.

(4)   Framework for understanding developmental stages of student thinking (perhaps a rubric developed from our discussion of student work). We plan to use this framework as an instructional resource to help instructors make instructional decisions during class when they are using teaching this material.

 

The next steps for the Math 12 group is to provide some guiding principles in terms of what is really important for students to learn in a prealgebra class. There is a spectrum of emphasis, starting with learning arithmetic skills alone, learning arithmetic skills after having provided a foundation of understanding (such as indepth knowledge of proportional reasoning), or emphasizing exclusively the conceptual understanding as the end objective and the way of solving skills problems.

 

In January, we assessed student work on final exams from 7 of the 10 sections of Elementary Algebra to gauge attainment of program-level SLOs. Relative to FA 03, we found significant decreases in the percent of students rated as proficient in communication and use of multiple representations, with no improvement in problem-solving. This contrasts with the sustained improvements in learning for Intermediate Algebra students. To understand this decline in learning, the Math DE Committee analyzed the activities written by Teaching Communities for alignment with these SLOs, surveyed instructors about the use of these activities, and reviewed exams given by Elementary Algebra instructors. See the attached “Measuring the Impact of Professional Development: Two Case Studies” for more analysis. The committee concluded that, in general, instructors were not teaching to the SLOs. In an attempt to improve learning, we implemented a three-step plan:

 

 

Recently there has been a large influx of campus initiatives that influence at least some of the Math Dev Ed program. For example, the AVID program will have a class (Math 25) which is directly connected to the student success class that AVID provides. The redoing of the campus tutoring program, including any changes in tutoring evaluation, Socratic questioning processand tutoring staff development will support our tutoring efforts. The creation of a Umoja Scholars program, similar to the Puente program except for African American males, might create a special section of veelopmental Math for their group. We are about to find out if MESA will be established on our campus. If so, then their students will be sprinkled throughout our Math 25 and Math 30 courses.

 

As discussed previously, we continue to conduct program assessment. We conducted a math lab usage study, in addition to our systematic tutor evaluation processes. We conducted an assessment of student learning using Elementary Algebra exams and used the results to focus our professional development activities. We also received the results of several persistence studies from OIR. The results showed that both the Elementary Algebra and Intermediate Algebra cohorts had respectable rates of persistence to and success in transfer-level math. We shared these results with 27 math faculty who attended a recent flex activity and facilitated a brainstorming session on strategies for encouraging persistence, e.g. requiring students to have an educational plan or meeting individually with students to choose their next math class.

 

 

This is a difficult question to answer. What are the measures of program effectiveness? We operate under the hypothesis that if we continue to implement all branches of the DE program, we will see improvements in student learning and student success over time.

 

 

One of the topics that the Math DE Committee has focused on is a series of new cohort pilots ("Connecting Consecutive DE Math Courses") spearheaded by Jeannine Stein. This new focus has the interest and support of the Math DE Committee. We have not begun the difficult task of implementing the recommendations that came out of the Basic Skills Retreats in SP 07, though we continue to work toward a revamping of basic skills curriculum through the work of the Lamon group. The work of the Lamon group will probably also lead to a revision of the Math 12 course outline. In addition, the Math DE Lead continues to struggle with coordinating the wide range of projects that fall under his purview, so the ground work for some projects, such as the retention study, has been laid even if the projects were not completed. We are beginning to doubt that work on Math 15 will be useful. We still believe that revision of the Math 26 course outline to make it consistent with the DE program will be useful, but we have not had enough person-power to complete it yet. We also still believe that the following "in progress" objectives will be useful, but we have not had enough time and person-power to complete them yet:

 

 

In SP 06, we conducted an assessment of student work on Elementary Algebra final exams. The results prompted a series of action plans outlined earlier.

 

 

 

Program review and the subsequent annual updates, if done conscientiously, will help us focus our efforts and reflect on our actions. It should help us create a shared vision for our program that will keep us on track. Also, we noticed that we need to think about the measures of program effectiveness, and how we will obtain the resources to measure the impact of our unit plan on program effectiveness.

 

 

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