New Life model – Compared to Statway & Quantway

I’m at the Statway winter institute (in Palo Alto, California), where we are getting some initial results from the Statway implementations going on this year — very encouraging, and the colleges involved have done a great job.  Makes me wish I was at a Statway institution.

I’ve also been having discussions in recent months about how the New Life model compares to the ‘Pathways’ (Statway & Quantway).   This has been addressed other places, but one aspect might help us understand a basic distinction.

First, let’s review — there are similar goals, and much common mathematics, between the New Life model and the Pathways.  The Carnegie Foundation has been gracious and inclusive in their work, which has enabled us to work on both approaches.  In both approaches, we seek to provide more appropriate mathematics for students and help them complete developmental mathematics more quickly.

So, a basic concern in Statway and Quantway is ‘recruitment’ — how do we identify the students who can take advantage of the Pathway?  The Pathways are designed to serve groups … Statway focuses on students whose ‘final’ course is an introductory statistics course, while Quantway is for students whose ‘final’ course is a quantitative reasoning-type course (with some variation in Quantway).  With the Pathways, a college has the existing sequence and then the Pathway alternative so that finding the students is a central concern.  This is especially the case with Statway, since it is a 2-semester sequence designed to be completed by each student.

In the New Life model, the vision is more general.  The first course, “MLCS” (Mathematical Literacy for College Students), is designed to connect with a variety of non-STEM college courses —  including intro statistics, quantitative reasoning, and others.  The second course, “Transitions” is used to connect to STEM-like college courses — such as college algebra, pre-calculus, and others.  The approach here provides flexibility to colleges and students.  Students identify their needed sequence of courses (hopefully 2 courses at most!) by looking at course prerequisites.

A difference between New Life and Statway is that Statway is a ‘2 semester set’ while New Life is ‘sequences for each student’ that follow patterns familiar to community college students — to take course X, the prerequisite is course A (which the student might or might not need).  Quantway is similar to the New Life MLCS, though the expectation is that Quantway students will proceed to take the quantitative reasoning course the next semester. 

In other words, colleges can build their own ‘stat path’ by implementing MLCS as a prerequisite to an intro statistics course.  Colleges can implement MLCS and Transitions as a replacement for the old courses.  Colleges can implement Transitions as a better bridge to STEM-like course; some might choose to do this for some STEM courses but not for ‘less STEM-like’ courses.  Transitions might be a better preparation for basic science courses than ‘intermediate algebra’.

New Life is all about flexibility at the local level to provide better mathematics preparation for their students.
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