Building a New Developmental Math Curriculum

You may have been wondering whether anybody is ‘making this real’ when people talk about basic change in developmental mathematics. Here at Lansing Community College (MI), we have been working on building pathways for students. Beginning in 2013, we are offering a new course — Math105, Mathematical Literacy based on the MLCS course (New Life). Math105 will be a prerequisite for 3 of our existing general education math courses.

Connected with this, we planning on a second introductory statistics course which can use this Math105 as a prerequisite. As a result, students will be able to move from Math105 to one of 4 destination courses — all meeting a degree requirement. Our beginning algebra course (Math107) will continue to meet the prerequisite for these 4 destination courses, as well as intermediate algebra.

Here is an image of our math pathways, effective 2013:

NOTES: The prerequisite to Math105 and Math107 is the same (‘pre-algebra’). We also have another pathway for ‘Tech Math’ (Math114 and 115), which is stands apart from this image (in general); we make exceptions for some students who change programs after starting Tech Math.

So, here is the main point of this post: Most of us have math courses that are outside of the beginning algebra to college algebra route, such as business math (Math117 at LCC) or quantitative reasoning (Math119 at LCC) … you can implement a course like MLCS (mathematical literacy for college students) to use as a prerequisite for these other courses. Some of us are still using arithmetic or pre-algebra as the prerequisite for such courses, and you may find that those prerequisites do not meet the needs very well … and MLCS could be an excellent match.

We at LCC are enthusiastic about building better math pathways for our students, and we hope you will join us in this work.

Developmental Mathematics Revival!

Bringing a new vitality to college mathematics 2011 to 2019