In an effort to make math courses more relevant and improve success rates in college math, various organizations and colleges developed a new model of math education that has come to be called "math pathways." Math pathways enable students to take different paths through the math curriculum, depending on their course of study. With math…

This call to action is based on a simple but important premise: The nation cannot allow college placement policies, processes, and instruments to undermine promising efforts to increase student success in mathematics and increase attainment of STEM credentials. Efforts to redesign math pathways hold great promise for improving the teaching and…

Basic brain function is not a mystery. Given that neuroscientists understand its basic functioning processes, one wonders what their research suggests to teachers of developmental algebra. What if we knew how to teach so as to improve understanding of the algebra taught to developmental algebra students? What if we knew how the brain processes…

The community colleges in the state of New Jersey went through a process of establishing statewide cut-off scores for English and mathematics placement tests. The colleges wanted to communicate to secondary schools a consistent preparation that would be necessary for enrolling in Freshman Composition and College Algebra at the community college…

Teaching mathematics in real-word contexts is a strategy to make math relevant for undergraduate students. However, very little research exists on students' methods of integrating contextual and mathematical knowledge through writing. This study uses an interdisciplinary writing assignment to investigate the relationship between students' written…

While developing strategies to meet the needs of underprepared students, public colleges and universities across the nation are being faced with directives, often stemming from public viewpoint, state legislatures, and/or state governing bodies of higher education systems, to modify existing university programs in an effort to decrease the cost of…

The purpose of this study was to assess how well the ASSET, COMPASS, and in-house readiness tests actually do in their placement of students into the algebra developmental courses. Specifically, the author collected and analyzed student data from these placement tools and the core final exams for MTH 03 and MTH 04 to determine how well these…

A major goal of this paper is to document changes that occurred in developmental mathematics classrooms in the community college setting when the graphing calculator (GC) Texas Instruments (TI)-83 was introduced to students. The six-week intervention was conducted during the section of Intermediate Algebra in the Community College Baltimore County…

Anyone who has ever taught developmental mathematics knows there is a problem in course placement. Some students test well and place clearly above their level, while other students place below their real capability because they either have been away from math for a number of years, or did not prepare for the assessment test. In either case, they…

This study investigated teacher perception of interactions used in on-line developmental mathematics courses at two-year colleges. A total of 98 AMATYC teachers were surveyed. The following conclusions were inferred from the study's findings: (a) The teacher responding to the survey was apt to be a female between the ages of 50 and 59, had taught…

An evaluation is presented of the remedial programs in each of New Jersey's 32 public colleges and universities. The academic outcome of full-time students entering in fall 1984 is tracked over four semesters. This analysis combines measures of the colleges' administrative efficiency in testing and enrolling students in needed remedial courses,…

"Informed math self-placement," a program implemented at American River College in Sacramento, California, to determine students' readiness for college-level math, has been in place for three years. This case study describes the development and implementation of math self-placement at American River. Math self-placement consists of a…