Can alternative developmental math pathways accelerate college success?

挑战

Developmental education costs institutions $7 billion annually, 学生及其家庭每年的费用为1美元.30亿年. $3支持,000 in loans per developmental course or $380 million in annual federal student loan debt, many policymakers see developmental mathematics placement as a devastating intersection where “access” leads to student debt, 对有色人种学生的影响尤为严重, 成年人, 第一代大学生, 还有那些来自低收入家庭的人.

The high schools they attend are more likely to lead to deficits in mathematics, and so these students often spend financial aid and personal savings on noncredit developmental courses and drop out before they graduate.

美国niversity System of Maryland (USM) wants to address the mathematics “pipeline” issues that have created significant barriers to progress for these postsecondary students. The Maryland Mathematics Reform Initiative First in the World (MMRI-FITW) grant is a collaborative effort between a selection of 4-year public USM institutions and 2-year community colleges in Maryland to develop and implement an alternative developmental math pathway to more efficiently prepare students for college-level statistics, the math required by most social science and humanities degrees.

作为拨款的一部分, USM hired 趣赢平台 to evaluate whether the statistics pathway accelerated developmental students’ progress into credit-bearing postsecondary courses and helped more of those students reach certificate or degree completion with a goal of informing better policies and improving educational equity.

解决方案

趣赢平台 incorporated input of project leaders, expert advisors, and campus liaisons. 然后, 与USM密切合作, we refined the MMRI-FITW project quasi-experimental evaluation. We identified high-priority student subgroups aligned with changes in the Integrated Postsecondary 教育 Data System (IPEDS) to ensure the study’s policy relevance for the 8 diverse participating institutions (5 community colleges and 3 USM universities), 除了为这个领域提供证据.

趣赢平台 provided 4 campuses that supplied at least 65 students to each group (N = 130) with treatment effect estimates for their students, 增加了一个成本效益组件, 提交了2篇文章，重点介绍了研究结果, 并与USM在3次全国会议上发表, 还有另一个计划.

结果

结果 show significantly higher percent年龄s of students who participated in the program (n = 748) passed developmental math (in fewer semesters) and enrolled in college-level math compared to comparison students (n = 1,293).

一旦注册, 参赛学生通过, 留在学校, or graduated at rates equal to comparison students regardless of race/ethnicity, 年龄, 社会经济, 或者注册状态.

Reforms cost 7% less and were 36% more cost-effective for increasing statistics enrollment than traditional approaches.

Since students who complete degrees earn more than those who do not, these findings reduce structural inequities by offering students an alternative pathway to accelerate their progress through college.

了解更多:

结果 of Maryland’s System-Level Developmental Mathematics Pathway Initiative (PDF)

Cost-Effectiveness of a Statistics-Based Approach to Developmental Mathematics