Small-Scale and Large-Scale Interventions to Improve State Students' College Readiness

摘要

We are conducting two interventions aimed at improving entering students' college readiness and mathematics placement. The small scale intervention, A Bridge to Calculus, is intended to improve students' placement from College Algebra into Calculus 1. The target population for this effort are students with high school experience in a Calculus course but whose performance on placement exams does not reflect this experience. At our institution this is a significant number of students and the goal of the project is to develop methods to address and accelerate students in this category. The course design, to take advantage of the students' prior experience, emphasizes practice and mastery using a modified emporium course design and the ALEKS software . This intervention runs as a summer course to around twenty incoming students on our campus. The large-scale intervention, A College Preparatory Mathematics Course, is a high school course developed for local high schools. Students who have completed the necessary coursework for high school graduation (Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Geometry) but who have not achieved the Texas college readiness standard2 are targeted. The students in the course have had experience in their high school classes in all of the concepts in the state standard, but have not had the chance to practice and master the material. The course we have developed emphasizes practice and mastery like the small-scale one, but participating school districts could not afford the commercial software. Thus we have built a course around the Web Work software3 that is available through a free and open license. This paper is a description of the early results of these two efforts, and a description of the lessons learned in the efforts so far.