Curriculum and Collaboration: Data on Pre-Calculus in Michigan

We will be at the MichMAA and MichMATYC meeting this weekend, at Hope College (Holland).  The highlight for me, of course, is my talk on curriculum & collaboration for change … with a focus on pre-calculus courses in Michigan.  That presentation file will be posted here in a couple of days.

The handout is already available, so I am posting that now: references Curricular Change college mathematics MichMAA April 2015

One page of this document is the references … information that might be helpful for those who are concerned about college algebra and pre-calculus courses.  Some of these are ‘standards’ type sources from the MAA; others are viewpoints (like Zal Usiskan’s talk on “cleaning up after the Common Core”) or data (like David Bressoud’s “Pitfalls of Precalculus”).  This page also summarizes what I found when analyzing the pre-calculus courses in Michigan, using 27 public institutions — which shows the tension between the titles “college algebra” and “pre-calculus”.

The other page of the document is a summary of how the prerequisite to calculus I at those 27 institutions transfers to the other 26.  This data is the result of looking at each institution accepted the other courses in transfer; it turns out that many of us (especially community colleges) are not very transparent about how we accept other college’s courses.  In some cases, I could get a tentative transfer result from the Michigan Transfer Network … though I also discovered that this source is fairly likely to contain errors.

Two overall bits of information:

1. In about 25% of the combinations (sending to receiving) I was not able to find any information on the transfer of the prerequisite course for calculus I .  This was found especially for community colleges.
2. Of the combinations where transfer information was available, almost 20% of the transfers “broke” the prerequisite … institution A’s prerequisite did not transfer as institution B’s prerequisite.  This breakage was found for both types of institutions (university and community college).

One pattern in the transfer analysis was especially bothersome — it appears that any modification or difference from the expected titles for prerequisite (“trig” or “pre-calculus”) was associated with a loss of transfer.  Institutions who called it “college algebra with trig” did not do as well as those who called it “trig”, even when the course served exactly the same purpose.  [I can’t speak to the learning outcomes, because very few institutions are transparent about those — universities, in particular, seem to treat learning outcomes as corporate secrets or ‘our secret recipe for math’.]

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