Since 2018, public community colleges and universities in Arkansas have collaborated to implement and scale mathematics pathways and English and mathematics corequisite supports to normative practice. This statewide initiative, called Strong Start to Finish Arkansas (SStF Arkansas), is supported by a community of practice and technical assistance from the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin. This report outlines the progress toward SStF Arkansas Initiative goals. It also presents the persistent scaling challenges that Arkansas higher education stakeholders face, as they work to increase equitable access and outcomes in undergraduate English and mathematics.
The Transfer Partnership Strategy (TPS) was a one-year collaboration that built on the work of the Texas Transfer Alliance. TPS effectively used regional coordinators to facilitate collaboration and communication between community colleges and universities.
Corequisite remediation, which places students directly into college-level work with additional academic support, has emerged as a robust alternative to stand-alone, prerequisite, developmental education. In 2013, we conducted the first published experimental evaluation of corequisite remediation. Our seven-year outcomes data indicate that the benefits of corequisite remediation with college-level statistics include substantially higher rates of associate’s and bachelor’s degree completion, as well as greater earnings.
In the United States, mathematics is a barrier that prevents many students from reaching their educational goals. Research shows that math is a significant contributor to education equity gaps.1 Students have differential access to quality math curricula and quality teachers, and the mathematics course sequences traditionally offered in schools and colleges fail to serve most students. Too often, mathematics serves as a gatekeeper that negatively affects primarily students who are Black, Latinx, or Indigenous, or who come from low-income backgrounds.
This Convening Recommendations document reflects recommendations from the “Math and Statistics Education for Nurses” Convening held by the High-Quality Mathematics Education for Nurses Task Force in October 2019. Its purpose is to illustrate areas of consensus, clarify the seven recommendations for developing improved quantitative education for nursing practice, and offer topics to serve as the focus for further collaboration and research.
The Texas 2-year and 4-year transfer inventory guide for AY 2020-21.
The University of North Carolina System (UNC System) Math Pathways Task Force Recommendations Report address both breadth and depth recommendations for UNC System institutions to implement mathematics pathways. The recommendations focus on multiple areas including design of math pathways; student supports; curriculum, pedagogy, and faculty engagement; advising; placement; K-14 partnerships; transfer and applicability; and evaluation.
Complete College America In order to increase the number of students earning postsecondary credentials, CCA argues that long-sequence remedial coursework is not effective. Instead, this organization proposes placement into college-level courses along with corequisite resources to promote student success.
The COVID-19 pandemic put higher education in a state of flux in 2020. Colleges and universities can no longer do “business as usual.” Making sure students are able to reenroll, receive credit for the work they completed before the pandemic, and help displaced workers retransition into the higher education pipeline will be extremely important once the crisis ends. Effective policies around transfer and applicability will need to be a key component of any strategy for how students, faculty, and institutions move forward from this disruption.
This brief summarizes recent work by the Texas Transfer Alliance, a collaboration of universities and community colleges in Texas led by the Dana Center since 2018. The brief further highlights some emerging practices from institutions in the state that show promise in improving student success and social mobility.
The Dana Center recommends that implementation of mathematics pathways is most effective when efforts are coordinated across institutions while still allowing for local decision making on how the pathways are operationalized. Monitoring depth of implementation of reforms under these conditions is a daunting task, especially when there is not a statewide policy mandate or significant funding for institutions. Collecting information about implementation practices is a further complexity. The Texas Success Center (TSC) has addressed these challenges related to implementation by highlighting exemplary practices among colleges and motivating continuous improvement. TSC supports Texas community colleges in a variety of ways including evaluating, supporting, and scaling ongoing efforts to improve student success rates.