There is an urgent need to support faculty to meaningfully change their teaching practice, but few professional development models in higher education have been shown to successfully do so. To fill the gap, this post describes efforts to adapt lesson study, a professional development approach used in K-12, for use in developmental mathematics in college.
Kathleen Almy led Illinois's transitional math course reform; now she's supporting high schools as they implement it. Working on both sides of the reform, she writes, has been an eye-opening experience.
Tiffany E. Taylor, associate program officer for the Board on Science Education at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, outlines strategies for making developmental mathematics reforms more equitable.
Vikash Reddy of the Campaign for College Opportunity writes in this essay originally published in the Los Angeles Times that a proposal to increase the quantitative reasoning requirement for admission to the California State University system would create barriers for minority and low-income students.
For students returning to college after a multiyear gap, the prospect of taking a mathematics course can be incredibly intimidating—but it doesn’t have to be. The Foundations of Mathematics course aims to transform the math experience by focusing on real-world problems, and for Gabriela Patino, a student at El Paso Community College, it made all the difference.
Nancy Shapiro, associate vice chancellor for education and outreach for the University System of Maryland, describes Maryland's math pathways initiative, how the reform's leaders took advantage of a First in the World grant from the U.S. Department of Education, and lessons learned from the work.
Susan Bickerstaff describes the Lesson Study model of professional development for instructors and a new research study examining how this model can be used in developmental mathematics.
Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow summarizes findings from a recently released CAPR brief on the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP) model, a promising new intervention that involves a revised developmental math course emphasizing statistical and quantitative reasoning skills.
Several states are considering major changes to dev ed. Find out what's on the legislative docket, get the latest findings on reforms in CUNY and Oregon community colleges, and more in our CAPR link roundup.