Learning, Success and Mathematics: 100%??

A few years ago, the chief academic officer (aka “Provost”) at my institution proposed that we adopt an “Operation 100%” which involved committing ourselves every student passing each course and every student completing their program of study. Faculty reaction was more negative than positive, especially about a goal of 100% success rate in every course.

Eventually, the 100% success rate was dropped and the 100% program completion goal was kept. This was driven, in large part, by the faculty reaction; we correctly pointed out that the 100% success rate was not a reasonable goal, especially in a community college setting. Although it was a relief to not have the 100% success rate goal, I have to admit … we should have taken the challenge.

In most cases, we design our courses with the assumption that a significant proportion of students will not succeed. More specifically, courses are designed based on a ‘definition’ that some students will be unable to learn the material in the allowed time frame. Sometimes, we say “this group of students were not ready for my course” or “that group of students has trouble understanding, and they try to memorize”. We tell ourselves that many of our students have challenges in their lives which make success in a course unlikely.

And, in terms of data, each of those statements can be shown to be ‘true’. However, that is simply proving a point of view which justifies the acceptance of low pass rates as ‘normal’. Another point of view, equally justified by data, is that faculty don’t know how to help students learn and succeed if the student actually needed their help in doing so.

So, let me frame the issue more scientifically:

Instead of designing a course assuming that some students won’t learn or pass, we should consider designing our courses so that we help all students learn and succeed.

You are probably thinking that this is exactly what we do right now. Read the statement again … it does not say that we “try to help students learn and succeed”; it says “we help all students learn and succeed”. Of course, not all students will succeed … not all students will learn. However, 100% success (and learning) should be our fundamental design principle. Accepting failure, and taking ‘lack of learning’ as a given, is an exceptionally weak design goal.

Imagine a surgeon who says “Well, I know some patients will not survive heart surgery so I am not going to stress myself out with worries about whether this patient survives.”

What does “design for learning and success” look like? I am working on a complete answer to that question. In the meantime, here are some implications I see in “100% success” as a goal:

Every class is an opportunity to help every student learn more mathematics
Every student knows some mathematics, though some ‘knowledge’ is faulty
Readiness to learn a topic is part of the class where we ‘teach’ the topic
Every student is active, all of the time: engaging with work sequenced to proceed from readiness to learning to knowing

I’m using this design for learning and success in algebra courses. If a class is primarily about learning to solve quadratic equations using square roots, the initiating activity makes sure that every student reviews basic concepts of radicals and the symmetry of square roots. Teams of 4 or 5 are used, so that every student has a reasonable opportunity to contribute and participate in the process. “Faulty knowledge” is caught by team members, or the instructor, or both — starting with the prerequisite knowledge. The activity proceeds to explore the primary concept in the new material, often starting with a simple example to solve followed by a ‘cloze’ type statement (fill in blanks) to complete a summary of the concept. Next, the activity involves the application of this concept to a more complex situation.

I have been engaged with the profession for a long time. As you probably know, the fundamental ingredient for student success is MOTIVATION … it’s hard for a student to learn if they are not motivated to attend class. Some of us use tricks to improve motivation — we have students play games in class, or we find some application using mathematics in a context that the student might care about.

What I am observing is that students find this intentional design innately motivating — especially the struggling student. For example, in one class this semester I have 8 students with mathematical challenges that are significant enough that I might normally ‘expect’ them to fail. In fact, prior to my current design, they all would have failed. [These challenges were obvious within the first week.] However, all 8 of the students continued to attend class; they found it motivating that every class was designed so that they would learn some mathematics. Initially, they did not learn enough mathematics … partly because these 8 students had a larger amount of faulty knowledge. For 2 of these students, they eventually stopped attending class when it became clear to them that their test scores were too low for them to pass the course. The other 6 are successful; none of these 6 struggling but succeeding students will receive a 4.0 grade; on the other hand, they are not all headed towards ‘barely passing’ either.

Do you want your students to succeed? Well, you better start by designing a course which provides 100% of the students an opportunity to learn every day. We can not afford to leave learning to unknown or random processes. Some patients do not survive … some students will not succeed. We should plan — and design — our classes for what we want to see, rather than what would happen without effective intervention on our part.

So, I am all in on “100% success in our courses”. I realize that some readers are in states where they are subject to some arbitrary minimum pass rate within their courses. That is not what I am talking about — I am talking about designing courses so that every student learns and can succeed. The last thing we need is some uninformed arbitrary ‘standard’ being inflicted on us and our students; this can not help but cause harm to learning and to students. We should focus on what we care about … learning mathematics, for every student.

If you want to base your career on failure being normal, go in to politics. Education should be based on learning to success as the goal for everybody in our classes.

Math curriculum in general, Research connected to practice | Jack Rotman | December 10, 2018 9:45 am

2 Comments

By Susan Jones, December 10, 2018 @ 10:32 am

Thanks for saying out loud that yes, we should be providing a path *from where they are* forward… all of ’em…

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