Comments on: PROOF POINTS: Inside the perplexing study that’s inspired colleges to drop remedial math

By: DuWayne Krause

DuWayne Krause — Mon, 18 Dec 2023 22:56:38 +0000

Point 1. I agree with the writer that stated that people don’ want to be logical. I have taught middle school and high school math. I force my students into logical thinking patterns. When that happens math gets much easier, for them.
Point 2. The math students are required to take, in college, is often irrelevant to their chosen field. Students are often forced to take and fail math classes that have no meaning, for them. A prime example of that is being forced to take College Algebra, when College Algebra is not used in the person’s chosen field. Many students, who would have been excellent in their chosen field, have to give up their dreams because they can’t pass this class.
Point 3. College is supposed to be about higher learning. Should it be up to them to even teach remedial skills to students, who are not qualified to be there.

By: Randall Bergman

Randall Bergman — Sun, 25 Jun 2023 14:57:48 +0000

This article is a good summary of the surprisingly small amount of published research in course & degree completion rates of students that take remedial post-secondary English & mathematics courses. I agree that there are too many confounding variables to make such broad conclusions and for sweeping policy changes to bypass remedial instruction and changes to course prerequisite requirements. Institutional research on the student dispositions, backgrounds, and success rates of those who utilize student support services throughout a semester getting math and/or writing tutors and/or attending lab sessions seems lacking and/or difficult to find. Such research should be published more often and be frequently updated for wide distribution at every post-secondary school that receives Federal & State funding. This aggregated statistical information needs to be in the hands of the students and parents (customers) prior to registering/purchasing these courses, especially for classes that have higher levels of non-completion and/or professors that issue D level grades disproportionally. Enforcement of additional simultaneous math and/or English credits/costs to students for any course because of their math or English placement test scores seems unethical rather than simply providing them the institutional information and the support services already covered in their tuition for any courses they wish to take/purchase. What types of students chose to (or not to) access and use student services and/or bypass, drop, withdraw, or fail particular courses begs for more qualitative institutional research and large scale independent studies. Construction of such an evidence-base across Colleges & University systems seems wanting and would help define, identify, and remediate for the post-secondary registration, demographic, and course completion gaps necessary to help increase degree completion for all students desiring post-secondary education in whatever areas of study they choose to benefit their potential economic and social outcomes afterwards.

By: Alex Eustis

Alex Eustis — Sun, 21 May 2023 05:04:42 +0000

The two-hour weekly tutoring workshop that the Stats students received, but the remedial Algebra students did not, feels rather glossed over in this article. Couldn’t it be the case that this study is a vindication of one-on-one tutoring, rather than a discrediting of remedial Algebra?

By: Tim Michael

Tim Michael — Thu, 18 May 2023 19:43:05 +0000

Dear Editors:
I think that some universities will use any excuse to move students ahead without making them take quantitative (read: difficult) courses, even or especially developmental ones. The skills used in statistics, and the ones we see being stressed here, are good skills to have on their own, but the skills needed for algebra and the other math used to measure things can be completely different. As professors we need to know that students can think methodically and apply themselves to learning linked concepts. The students need to build confidence with numbers, as well. With statistics, we find out whether students can interpret a histogram, but often that requires little to no knowledge of how median, mean and/or standard deviation come together to summarize knowledge. How does one teach standard deviation when students don’t understand basic algebra? How can we teach testing of hypotheses without understanding what goes into a t-statistic (as a ratio)? It’s teaching definitions, at best. Most of us try to build on that math knowledge at upper levels, or with our graduate students, and it’s tough enough trying to teach people how to measure things without taking away their foundation of math learning to start with. Finally, I suspect that many of the people promoting the “jump” approach 1) don’t have tenure, and 2) don’t teach quantitative courses regularly. The folks without tenure are pressured to move students through without regard to student outcomes (understanding, not grades). And that’s how we end up having this debate.

By: Lara Kurst

Lara Kurst — Tue, 16 May 2023 11:25:08 +0000

I was a math major and did some grad school in physics, but i tutored people in math during undergrad. Statistics is much simpler because for most people because they're using real things, situations people conceptually understand, like exponential growth. Almost all the concepts even the complicated ones can be explained with a drawing. The place that people break down in algebra is polar coordinates. They just cannot figure it out. There's no fun way to learn it you just have to use it enough until it's natural and you don't have to think about it. (There are really good videos on YouTube for this now, for example a video of a line going in a circle and showing how it draws a sine wave.) Once you remember the unit circle, you have to build an unnatural intuition in your brain for converting between coordinate systems. I don't think this is easy but that type of thinking is really important for high-level math. There's so many assignments that we had where we would go to the library and sit together and we would just stare at the same problem for hours and have no idea how to do it, not even how to start. And these would be proofs where you can't start a problem and then learn something from whatever strategy you chose not working. So instead you just stare at it and then you go home and you sleep and you wake up and suddenly you just get it. It's just happens, that your brain understands and you can just do it as if it was easy. Trying to explain the satisfaction, the rush of epiphany to people is impossible. You can't get it unless you've experienced it. But the core issue is that people do not like to have to be logical. They don't want to be originally constrained by rationality. I could go into why I think this is becoming a huge problem for society but suffice to say that the reason that they can't do math isn't because they're incapable, it's because they don't like being forced to do something where there's only one right way to do it and you have to for years just sit there be told how to do something and just do it. It took thousands of years to get to the point where we had calculus and now it seems obvious that you could use numbers that way. And the way we got to calculus was logic. Mathematicians used to fight over whether or not numbers were like arbitrary The point is parents don't know how to teach their kids logic anymore. In one sense I lucked out and was born into a family that's almost exclusively engineers. But in other sense that has me navigating society very difficult because it's listen to see someone say something that is not internally consistent and have to treat that with seriousness.