This chapter examines how student success allows a college to recoup their funding loss from a costly reform effort in developmental math education.

In this supplement, the cost to implement and operate the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP) program across the participating colleges is presented separated into primary cost categories based on program components describing what portion of spending went to training, teacher time in class, teacher time outside of class, advisement,…

American colleges are redesigning the ways in which they offer remedial courses, including mainstreaming students into college-level courses and making greater use of learning-technology to tailor the curriculum to students' specific academic needs. Exploiting a statewide cutoff on a remediation placement exam along with data on student outcomes…

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…

Community colleges are typically assumed to be nonselective, open-access institutions. Yet access to college-level courses at such institutions is far from guaranteed: the vast majority of two-year institutions administer high-stakes exams to entering students that determine their placement into either college-level or remedial education. Despite…

The impact of developmental mathematics programs on student success in college-level mathematics has been a controversial topic in higher education. One limitation of the current research is that scholars have been unable to isolate the causal impact of such participation on the student's success in college-level mathematics because it is…

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 Technical Panel on 12th Grade Preparedness Research, convened by the Governing Board, consists of seven members with expertise in a variety of measurement and policy areas related to preparedness. The purpose of the Panel was to assist the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) in planning research and validity studies that will enable the…

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…

To take math anxiety out of math instruction, teachers need to first know how to easily diagnose it in their students and second, how to analyze causes. Results of a recent study revealed that while students believed that their math anxiety was largely related to a lack of mathematical understanding, they often blamed their teachers for causing…

The effectiveness of the Mathematical Skills Foundation Programme at Memorial University of Newfoundland (Canada), a program that evaluates the mathematical knowledge of each student to individualize instruction, was studied with data from 304 students. Results suggest that the remedial program did not have a positive measurable effect on students…

In 1995, Prince George's Community College made at-risk student retention an institutional priority. Studies conducted that year found that 70% of new students tested for placement needed remediation in at least one area, and that the pass rate in developmental mathematics was approximately 50%. A two-part intervention program was initiated to…