Update about the New Life Project

Quite a bit of activity has taken place, relative to the New Life Project.

The online community continues to be active. The wiki site (http://dm-live.wikispaces.com) has a high level of use for this type of thing – consistently 20 to 40 different visitors per day. This companion blog (https://www.devmathrevival.net) averages about 40 visits per day. The New Life community has several pilots and implementations underway at this time; if your college is planning or doing one, it would be helpful to let me know (via email, or posting on the wiki site).

Some of us have submitted proposals for the Jacksonville AMATYC conference this November on our New Life work. The AMATYC program committee is currently reviewing these – whatever the outcome, I appreciate our group’s willingness to share (and the work involved in sharing).

There is now enough activity on implementing New Life courses that textbook companies are developing products to support these courses. I have had conversations with editors at Pearson, and at Cengage. They would prefer that I not share details of their plans (since publishing plans are subject to changes for many reasons) … however, the companies are working hard to get materials ready. Based on what I know, some materials will be ready for class testing this coming year (2012-2013), with regular materials published later (late 2013, early 2014). I hope this information helps you plan as you consider whether you can implement a New Life model (MLCS and Transitions) at your college.

This activity related to the New Life model has also risen on the radar of companies that provide placement tests (especially Accuplacer and Compass). Accuplacer now has a process to develop ‘customized placement tests’ in the computer adaptive model, based on a group identifying the content needed and a commitment from a set of colleges to use the customized placement test. Many of us are using “placing into beginning algebra” as a proxy for “placing into MLCS”, and our pilot projects will provide some information whether this works in practice. There is less confidence about using a proxy (“placing into intermediate algebra”) for the Transitions course, so this might be an area for us to consider in the near future. Such a placement test is important because we do not want to assume (or require) that all students need to complete both MLCS and Transitions; we want to provide a mechanism for many students to place directly in to Transitions. For us to proceed with a customized placement test, we would need to form a work group to coordinate with the company (including the gathering of the commitments from colleges to use the customized test). We are probably not ready for this step, quite yet … though it might be appropriate to form the work group later this year.

Oh, in case you’ve forgotten the “New Life” course names – the first one (MLCS) is “Mathematical Literacy for College Students”, which provides the mathematics useful to all college students (including some algebra). The second course is “Transitions”, which provides appropriate mathematics for students continuing in to college algebra, pre-calculus, and other courses at that level; Transitions is intended to be more symbolically-oriented than MLCS (which emphasizes numeric and graphical methods, with some symbolic). You can go to the wiki site listed above for more information.

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