{"id":1558,"date":"2013-03-14T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-14T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carnegie25live.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=1558"},"modified":"2025-12-16T11:27:48","modified_gmt":"2025-12-16T19:27:48","slug":"carnegie-program-achieves-dramatic-success-for-community-college-students-in-developmental-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.carnegiefoundation.org\/carnegie-program-achieves-dramatic-success-for-community-college-students-in-developmental-mathematics\/","title":{"rendered":"Carnegie Program Achieves Dramatic Success for Community College Students in Developmental Mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching\u2019s newly developed community college mathematics pathway in statistics, Statway\u2122, has achieved dramatic results in the initial implementation, tripling the success rate for developmental mathematics students in half the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are impressive results from a program in its first year of implementation. We expect to build on this and achieve even higher goals in the years ahead,\u201d Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carnegie formed a network of community colleges, professional associations, and educational researchers to develop and implement the Community College Pathways (CCP) program<\/a>. The program is organized around two structured pathways, known as Statway\u2122 and Quantway\u2122. Rather than a seeming random walk through a maze of possible course options, students and faculty are now joined in a common, intensive year-long experience toward a shared goal\u2014to achieve college math credit in one year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The two Pathways are designed to replace a sequence of courses that typically can take as long as two or more years once students are placed into developmental mathematics at entry to a community college. Recent studies report that between 60 and 70 percent of students either do not successfully complete the sequence of required courses or avoid taking math altogether and therefore never graduate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colleges first launched the Community College Pathways Program during the 2011-2012 academic year. The first cohort of Statway\u2122 students began in the fall of 2011. This initial cohort of students spanned 19 community colleges and two state universities across five states. In total, there were 50 faculty teaching 55 sections of Statway\u2122 with 1,133 students enrolled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThese are the students that community colleges especially need to serve well,\u201d Bryk said. \u201cA disproportionate number are minority, from families whose primary language is not English, and typically where neither parent has a post-secondary degree.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DOWNLOAD: Community College Pathways: 2011-2012 Descriptive Report<\/a> (PDF)<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Working with institutional researchers at the network institutions, Carnegie was able to establish baseline data for the percentage of developmental mathematics students that successfully completed a college-level mathematics course. Only 5.9 percent of these developmental mathematics students received credit for college-level mathematics in one year. Only 15.1 percent had achieved this goal after two years, 20.4 percent after three years, and 23.5 percent after four years.  After a full year of Statway\u2122, 51 percent of Statway\u2122 students had successfully completed the full Pathway (receiving a grade of C or better in the final term).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There is also data for Quantway\u2122, where the first cohort of students spanned eight community colleges across three states with 23 faculty teaching 24 sections with 418 students enrolled. Since implementation of Quantway\u2122 did not begin until spring 2012, the end of Pathway results are not yet available. However, the data collected so far show that Quantway\u2122 students are on a similar road to success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Carnegie Pathways emphasize conceptual understanding and the ability to apply mathematical skills that help students to understand the world around them and that will be useful in a growing number of occupations and professions.  Student learning outcomes for both Pathways were established and vetted by a group of national experts and professional societies in the discipline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What makes Carnegie\u2019s Community College Pathways work different from previous attempts to ameliorate the high failure rates in developmental mathematics goes well beyond a change in course content. Both Pathways have been explicitly designed to capitalize on research-based findings about powerful mathematics instruction. These include an emphasis on:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Productive struggle<\/em>. It\u2019s not about guessing what the teacher wants to hear or about finding a particular answer. It is about the process of thinking<\/em>, making sense, and persevering in the face of not knowing exactly how to proceed or whether a particular approach will work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Explicit connections to concepts<\/em>. Research suggests making explicit connections among mathematical or statistical facts, ideas, and procedures can improve both conceptual and procedural understanding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deliberate practice<\/em>. Deliberate practice avoids rote repetition for carefully sequenced problems developed to guide students to a deeper understanding of core concepts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These three learning opportunities are embedded in the specific lessons, assessments, and out-of-class resources that form the curriculum for each Pathway. Both of the Pathways use face-to-face and online learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Pathways integrate:<\/p>\n\n\n\n