This dissertation examined how adult learners who took developmental mathematics in a community college and passed the courses, viewed their self-efficacy and the roles they felt self-efficacy had on their successful completion of mathematics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adult learners in two U.S. community colleges.…

Throughout the 21st century, the discipline of developmental education has come under fire for low success rates and has created a great deal of controversy. This has especially been the case for developmental math. Over the years, there have been many initiatives to improve student success and completion in developmental math. Some have succeeded…

Community colleges began as a way to offer higher education to those that wanted it but could not leave home to further their degree. As they evolved, they began allowing students to be admitted with very little admission requirements. The lack of admission requirements led to students being admitted into community colleges that were not prepared…

Traditionally, post-secondary developmental mathematics courses aspire to equip students with mathematical content knowledge needed to succeed in calculus and subsequent STEM courses. The literature shows that this goal alone is insufficient, as the emphasis on content acquisition often comes at the expense of developing higher-order skills such…

A difficult issue for tutoring programs is low participation, especially at commuter campuses. At the University of Houston-Downtown, this problem seems particularly acute for developmental education (DE) courses. This paper describes the Supplemental Instruction (SI) program at the University of Houston-Downtown (UHD) with focus on the role of…

This report analyzes evidence from a new study assessing the effectiveness of Quantway 1 (QW1), a single-term accelerated developmental math course with a focus on quantitative reasoning. Quantway® is one of the Pathways courses (along with Statway®) developed by a network of faculty and content experts convened by the Carnegie Foundation to…

Community college developmental math students (N = 657) from three math levels were asked to place five whole numbers on a line that had only endpoints 0 and 20 marked. How the students placed the numbers revealed the same three stages of behavior that Steffe and Cobb (1988) documented in determining young children's number sense. 23% of the…

Developmental education programs and services have long provided underprepared and unprepared postsecondary students with the academic tools and life-management skills necessary to successfully complete collegelevel coursework. Legislation and policy changes, including implementing statewide minimum admissions requirements and restricting…

Carnegie's Community College Pathways (CCP) offers two pathways, Statway® and Quantway®, that reduce the amount of time required to complete developmental mathematics and earn college-level mathematics credit. The Pathways aim to improve student success in mathematics while maintaining rigorous content, pedagogy, and learning outcomes. It is…

This study tracks students' progression through developmental math sequences and defines progression as both attempting and passing each level of the sequence. A model of successful progression in developmental education was built utilizing individual-, institutional-, and developmental math-level factors. Employing step-wise logistic regression…

Examining the actions taken during a teaching experiment can provide insight into practices applicable to the use of mathematics technology to assist adult learners. A case study in the form of a teaching experiment was conducted with a small number of subjects to allow for detailed examination of the influence of technology on student thinking.…

This study analyzed the effect of mathematics courses on a cohort of students at a 4-year university in order to compare the effect of mathematics on adult students, those 25 and older, and traditional-age students. The transcripts of the 118 adult students and the 3,747 traditional-age students who were freshmen in the fall of 1999 were compared.…

This research study examined the 2006 cohort of First-Time-in-College students from all 23 community colleges in Virginia. The goal was to examine fall-to-fall persistence and success in the first college-level mathematics course. Predictor variables used were developmental status, age, gender, and race and ethnicity of the student. Interaction…

Examining the actions taken during a teaching experiment can provide insight into practices applicable to the use of mathematics technology to assist adult learners. A case study in the form of a teaching experiment was conducted with a small number of subjects to allow for detailed examination of the influence of technology on student thinking.…

Using a novel design approach, a randomized experiment (RE) was embedded within a regression discontinuity (RD) design (R-RE-D) to evaluate the impact of developmental mathematics at a large midwestern college ("n" = 2,122). Within a region of uncertainty near the cut-score, estimates of benefit from a prospective RE were closely…