[F]or high school graduates making their way through college, math is a perennial roadblock. Students who didn’t take higher-level math courses in high school are less likely to go to college – but even for those who enroll, far too many need a remedial course in the subject.
So the Vermont State Colleges, the Vermont Student Assistance Corp., and the state Agency of Education have pitched a joint plan: a specialized math course, offered to high school seniors, that will ensure college-readiness upon successful completion.
“One of the things that stops students is that they don’t have a successful first year, wherever that is. And sometimes those gateway courses, as we used to call them, are getting in the student’s way,” said Anita Long, academic support coordinator at VSAC.
The course itself – including its curriculum, course materials and assessment – will be designed by three high school and career technical education teachers alongside three college professors, all from Vermont. The group began meeting this summer, and is to begin to experiment with parts of the course in their classrooms this year. The course will go online in a select few high schools next fall, and be launched statewide by 2020.
Students who successfully complete the course and pass its assessment will be automatically qualified to take math courses within the Vermont State Colleges System without needing to take a remedial course. The project, which is underwritten by a federal GEAR UP grant, will also measure how often students who complete the new course also do well in their first-year math courses once they get to college.
Vermont isn’t the only state taking notice and retooling math remediation with a specialized course. And teachers at work on the project used an open-source math curriculum developed by the Southern Regional Education Board as a springboard for their work, according to Yasmine Ziesler, the chief academic officer for the Vermont State Colleges System.
The problem of math for higher education enrollment is well documented. For Vermont’s class of 2012, only 24 percent who didn’t take higher-level math in high school went on to enroll in college. Meanwhile, a dismal 37 percent of 11th-graders in Vermont scored proficient or above on the math SBAC in 2017.
But aside from boosting math skills and college retention, people involved with the project say the initiative is also an opportunity to show proof of concept for another experiment in Vermont’s education world – competency-based learning.
The new approach de-emphasizes specific knowledge and highlights the importance of mastering different skills. The course will mirror that new tack, stressing the foundational reasoning and problem-solving skills that underlie most types of math.
“This is a very hands-on math course. Very applied. So the pedagogy of the course is very different than say, a traditional AP math course,” Long said. “A question we’ve had is: will that appeal to the very students that we need to appeal to? We can see who stays engaged and who has success.”
Julie Parah is a math teacher at Green Mountain Union High School in Chester who is helping to develop the course. She said she got involved in large because of the competency-based learning approach to the project.
“What’s a variable? How do we use it? How does algebra generalize numerical patterns to make things more efficient? That’s all important. And I’m not saying we should stop doing that. I just don’t think it’s enough,” she said. “It’s kind of our job as members of society or people in the workplace to figure out what questions to ask.”
