TITLE III

Strengthening Institutions

The Quantitative/Mathematic Skills of our Students

The First Year

  Introduction:  The 2005-2006 academic year has been the first year of our five year Title III grant.  The US Department of Education under the strengthening institutions program awarded the grant to Buffalo State College to improve the quantitative/ mathematical performance of our students.  There are three main thrusts to the grant

• The general education of all students including those who take MAT 103 to satisfy their mathematics requirement
• The preparation of the pre-service K-8 teachers all of whom take MAT 121 and MAT 122
• Finally those students in programs that have a mathematics requirement which typically includes calculus

In general the grant seeks to foster closer communication and cooperation between the mathematics department and those client departments whose students are required to take mathematics courses.  The activities of the grant are planned and carried out by three different working groups, one for each of the three categories listed above.  This first year these groups have focused on gathering information and assessment data and in one case (the general education group) moving ahead with a plan for change by offering a faculty development workshop to help faculty who will be trying new content and pedagogy in some of the MAT 103 sections beginning in the fall of 2006. 

During this first year we have collected data on the distribution of mathematics courses taken by entering freshmen and their performance in those courses.  This data will form the baseline for us to judge our progress and the effects of the innovations and changes that come about as a result of the title III project.  Of the 1192 matriculated freshmen entering in fall of 2005 34% or 408 students enrolled in a math course for the fall semester and another 368 or 30% took a spring math course.  We had 79 freshmen students who took a math course in each of the semesters during the 2005-06 year.  Finally, we also note that 103 or 8.6% of the freshmen who entered in the fall did not return for the spring semester.

Table 2 contains data on students taking pre-calculus and calculus courses in 2005-06.  About 37% of the students enrolling in these three courses either failed or withdrew.  Only in MAT 126 did either the freshmen or the upper classmen achieve an average GPA greater than 2.0.  As the table shows, the freshmen performed slightly better than the non freshmen in most cases.

Table 2:  Pre-calculus and Calculus results for 2005-06

 

 Observations:  We note that 25 students, or about one third of those freshmen students who took a math course in both semesters took MAT 103 in the fall and then enrolled in MAT 110, 121, 124, or 126 in the spring semester.  It is understood that by taking MAT 103 they had satisfied a general education requirement; however, the MAT 103 course was certainly a poor choice in terms of preparing them for the math course they took subsequently.  In studying the math histories of some of the students in programs that have a math requirement that includes calculus we find that many students took MAT 103 at one time early in their academic careers, again a poor choice in view of the requirements they needed to fulfill in subsequent courses.

We also counted 33 students whose major codes indicate that they are in a program that has a mathematics requirement yet they took MAT 103 during their freshmen year.  Again they have satisfied a general education requirement by doing this; however, MAT 103 does not help them prepare for the rigors of future math courses they will have to take if they stay in the major they indicated as entering freshmen.

A look at entering freshmen Math SAT scores shows the Buffalo State average to be about 30 points below the national average.  We have looked at the scores by major codes of the entering freshmen.  Figure 1 shows these results.  One interesting statistic is that entering students intending to major in one of the sciences tend to have lower Math SAT scores than almost all of the other majors.  This result is a little puzzling and invites interesting speculation as to the reason.  We must keep in mind that the number of students indicating a science major code is relatively small and there is a large standard deviation in their Math SAT scores.

Figure 1: Math SAT Scores for incoming freshmen

 

Summary of major grant activities to date:  Three classrooms in Ketchum Hall will be converted into smart classrooms with appropriate furniture and storage space to better serve introductory mathematics classes, particularly MAT 121 and 122.  We have purchased additional sets of manipulatives used in these courses for elementary education majors with the goal that the availability of the materials and the in classroom storage will encourage more use of the materials.

A two day facilitated workshop was held May 15 and 16 for all Title III staff and invited members of the mathematics department for the purpose of reviewing the goals of the project and giving everyone involved a chance to come together to discuss how we measure our success.

The group working on the general education component has opted to pilot a fairly radically different approach to the MAT 103 course beginning in the fall 2006 semester.  The current course emphasizes various voting methods, Euler circuits, and finally various growth models presented in a fairly conventional manner.  The piloted version places emphasis on the development of critical thinking skills and visits several fundamental mathematical concepts as the context for practicing these skills.  This decision was made in concert with the mathematics department and involves new text materials and a different pedagogical approach compared to standard practice currently used in MAT 103 sections. The new pedagogical approach involves more student-student interaction as well as more student-faculty interaction in an attempt to develop life thinking skills as opposed to the memorization of mathematical procedures that is common to more traditional approaches.  To help the faculty that have volunteered to try this new approach we provided a one week workshop led in part by the author of the new materials which will be used.  The workshop was held May 22-May 26 with 8 MAT 103 instructors and 4 prospective student tutors attending.  There will be follow-up meetings with the faculty teaching these sections during the semester to provide support and share ideas as we gain experience with this new approach.  In addition the Title III project will make a significant investment in providing trained student tutors to be available to help students in the MAT 103 classes.

At the end of the spring 2006 semester the elementary education group administered an assessment instrument to 57 students completing EDU 312 and planning to student teach in the fall 2006 semester.  The instrument used is a nationally normed instrument which measures the readiness to teach math in the elementary grades.  These results will form a baseline for us to measure future success of our program and will also provide valuable data for the El Ed department as they prepare for future NCATE visits.

The math/science group has assembled a taxonomy of student quantitative/mathematical difficulties which are frequently observed in various science and technology courses.  An assessment instrument is under construction which will hopefully give us a quantitative measure of the pervasiveness of these difficulties and will also serve to inform workshops that will be held next year for math and science faculty members.  The assessment will be given to a pilot group of students in the fall 2006 semester, revised and given to a larger population of students in the spring 2007 semester.   An interesting fact is that while the grant was written to address student difficulties in calculus classes the problems that science and technology faculty are reporting to us have to do with more basic mathematical and quantitative reasoning skills than with student knowledge of or ability to do calculus.

Preliminary recommendations:  It is apparent that many students are misplaced in mathematics courses.  There are probably many reasons for this, but certainly one reason is that many students enter as undeclared and are unsure of the major, and therefore the mathematics requirements, of the major they may choose later.  Another reason seems to stem from the fact that advisers have no hard data upon which to base advisement, but rather, depend on the self reported background and ability of the students.  It seems that a return to some kind of math placement program could improve this situation.  It is obvious that a “calculus readiness” assessment of some sort might improve the withdrawal and failure rates in calculus and pre calculus courses.  It also seems that many more students could benefit from “remedial” math courses such as MAT 097, 098, and 110 than are presently placed in these courses.  The fact that these remedial courses do not satisfy a college requirement produces a dilemma for many students and advisers when it comes time to choose courses.  Unfortunately the past experience of the institution with a math placement exam is not very positive for good reasons.  However, it is recommended that some form of math placement program be reconsidered, perhaps by the College Senate Math Oversight Committee.

It may be a step in the right direction that the new Intellectual Foundations math requirement effective the fall of 2006 will require students to meet certain criteria before they may take a math course to satisfy the general education requirement.  We have no access to high school transcripts or ACT scores; however, based on the Math SAT requirement of 460 or higher we note that 267 entering freshmen in 2005 would have failed to meet that criteria.  If this is any indication there will be a need for far more sections of the remedial math courses to be offered and suggests that the Title III project may very well want to review the content and pedagogy used in those courses.

We cannot avoid mentioning the situation caused by the large numbers of part-time instructors who teach the introductory level mathematics courses.  While some are retired and teaching as a way to stay active and involved, others are trying to make a living teaching part time.  As a result they frequently are not on campus and available to students except during those times immediately before and after their classes.  In spite of low pay and in many cases very heavy teaching loads the part time instructors have been responsive and enthusiastic about participating in the workshop and other activities of the project.  It is strongly recommended that steps be taken to provide some kind of job security and reasonable pay for those individuals who provide the only contact with the mathematics discipline for most of our students.