How to Impact Student Success

College leaders (presidents, trustees, chancellors, etc) have discovered “student success” as an issue, and they promptly implement systemic changes which impede student success.

In some ways, their errors are understandable.  We’ve got plenty of data which shows …

• Traditional remediation in mathematics most often functions as a barrier to students
• Students who complete college math in their first year are more likely to complete their program/degree
• Placement by single-measure tests tends to underplace 20% to 30% of the students

Leaders have also accepted the surface logic of “alignment” (At the Altar of Alignment  ), just like some folks accept the logic of ‘trickle-down-economics’.  Alignment takes many forms … from aligning K-12 and college expectations to selecting a math course for a student’s program.  Little data exists to show that alignment improves student success; like tax cuts, alignment is difficult to argue against — even though we should.

When I talk about student success, I am referring to the important measures of student success — learning, preparation, and a liberating education.  Passing my math course is not a measure of student success … being able to deal with mathematics in other situations IS.  Curiously, I asked by college president about measuring student learning as a component of student success; the response was that we should drop course grades and move to a portfolio.

So, here is the type of thing I mean by student success.

In a conversation with a small group of science faculty, they shared their frustration with student’s inability to apply math — algebra in particular — to scientific contexts.  A low level example was a simple temperature conversion:  T[sub C] = (5/9)(T[sub F] – 32), given temperature of 40 degrees C, convert to degrees F.

Many students treat this as a calculation problem (5/9)(40 – 32), instead of algebraic.  It seems to make no difference if subscripts are used or the letters C and F instead.

Student success is being able to reason (algebraically) in this case to get the job done.

In this case, we have ‘alignment’. The math course students took before the specific science course included replacements for both independent and dependent variables.  Alignment is a very (VERY) weak estimate of preparation for student success.

My goal of student success is not especially lofty.  In a nutshell, this is it:

Given a situation involving application of concepts and skills easily within the mathematical reach of the students, they will formulate a reasonable solution method and execute this solution with reasonable precision.

This goal is quite a bit above the useless definition of student success seen by college leaders: course completion one-at-a-time.  Student success means that my colleagues in other disciplines would be pleasantly surprised by how well our students apply mathematical concepts and relationships which arise in that discipline.  Those faculty would not need to dilute the scientific rigor of their course (in whatever discipline) just because the students we send to them lack quantitative understanding.

We live in an era of ‘completion obsession’.  It’s not that program completion is bad … completion is a great thing; the best day of my year is getting to see some of my students walk across the stage to get their degree.  The problem is that the obsession with completion devalues the education we are supposed to be providing to our students.  In the completion fixation, we watch students on the marathon course to make sure that they pass each critical point — without noticing that many students are running without understanding strategy or skill.  It’s like perseverance is the only trait we value.

Our job is to keep education in mathematics.  Student success means that we’ve made a difference in how our students are able to deal with quantitative situations; mathematics is an enabler of multiple career options for all students, not a subject to be gotten-done-with.

 
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