Developmental Math

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What is the Problem?

More than 60 percent of all students entering higher education in the United States are required to complete remedial/developmental courses as a first step towards earning associate’s or bachelor’s degrees. A staggering 70 percent of these students never complete the required mathematics courses, blocking their entry to higher education and a wide array of careers.

Improving Developmental Math in Community Colleges

Recognizing the grave consequences for both individual opportunity and the nation’s social and economic well being, Carnegie has engaged networks of faculty members, researchers, designers, students, and content experts in the creation of two new pathways, one in statistics and the other in quantitative reasoning.

Our goal is to dramatically increase—from 5 to 50 percent—the proportion of students who earn college math credit within a year of continuous enrollment. We aim to put college students on a pathway of success, not just in college, but in their lives and careers as well.

The Pathways

Statway™ is a one-year pathway focused on statistics, data analysis, and causal reasoning that culminates in college-level statistics. Learn more about the Carnegie Statway NIC »

Quantway™is a pathway focused on quantitative reasoning with the aim of promoting success in college mathematics. Learn more about the Carnegie Quantway NIC »

The Instructional System

Version 1.0 of the Statway™ and Quantway™ lessons were created by The Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin under sponsorship of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and are copyrighted by both organizations. Participants in both Carnegie’s Statway™ and Quantway™ Networked Improvement Communities are not using Version 1.0, but instead are using Version 1.5 of the lessons, which have been co-developed and improved by the Network.

These materials are part of an Instructional System that includes:

1. Ambitious learning goals leading to deep and long lasting understanding;
2. Lessons and out-of-class materials to advance these goals;
3. Formative and summative assessments, including end of module and end of course assessments;
4. Productive Persistence — an evidence-based package of practical student activities and faculty actions integrated throughout the instructional system to increase student motivation, tenacity and skills for success;
5. Language and literacy — a component that interweaves necessary supports in instructional materials and classroom activities so that learning is accessible to all;
6. Dynamic online environment for network engagement and collaboration;
7. Advancing Quality Teaching — a component to provide instructors with the knowledge, skills, and habits necessary to experience efficacy in initial use of the Pathways and develop increasing expertise over time;
8. Rapid Analytics to support the continuous improvement of teaching and of the materials.
    

Improving Continuously

To promote consistently high performance as the project scales and to ensure effective implementation at scale across contexts, Carnegie has organized its collaborators and cooperative members into Carnegie Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) to strengthen mathematics teaching and learning at the college level. It is the Foundation’s intent that over time the NICs will promote continuous improvement strategies throughout their member institutions.

What Makes Carnegie’s Work Different?

• We steward Networked Improvement Communities focused on the lack of student success in developmental mathematics.
• We join the worlds of research and practice, making faculty co-developers and research partners.
• We focus on continuous evidence-based improvement.
• We learn from practice to improve continuously.
• We believe that much more can be accomplished together than even the best of us can accomplish alone.

Use of Materials

Statway™ and Quantway™ are trademarks of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching that Carnegie secured as the steward of the Networked Improvement Communities to provide quality assurance to its members. To maintain the NIC's quality standards, however, it is essential that the NIC control the use of these brand names. Thus, the Statway™ or Quantway™ name would not apply to any third party derivatives of this work.