Numeracy skills, or the ability to understand and calculate using simple numbers, along with digital literacy and problem-solving abilities, enable a person to engage with and make sense of the world around them. These essential skills are more critical than ever for economic mobility and healthy civic participation in today’s society. Yet, the latest global survey of adult skills presents a troubling picture for the United States. Among adults in America, these skills have declined in recent years. According to the most recent PIAAC report, a third of U.S. adults lack basic numeracy and adaptive problem solving skills to navigate dynamic situations.

While workforce development programs have expanded over the last decade, many programs are missing a focus on building and maintaining foundational skills. Adults must have these critical skills—such as reading, writing, and applying basic math concepts—in order to succeed in more targeted or advanced training and learning, and to enter skilled jobs.

That’s where adult basic education (ABE) comes in. ABE offers adult learners foundational skills training in literacy, numeracy, and the use of technology to support their needs and workforce development. And new investments and a consortium of researchers and practitioners are helping elevate the visibility of the field and strengthen outcomes for learners. Among these is the Adult Numeracy in the Digital Era (ANDE) project, a partnership between Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd, JSI/World Education, and Pennsylvania’s Department of Education, which is reimagining foundational mathematics education for adults. 

Building a Stronger Foundation Through a New Vision for Adult Math Education

According to the OECD’s report on the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills, skills in numeracy, literacy, and advanced problem-solving are a driving force in adults’ employability and increased income—more so even than formal education. Notably, numeracy has an especially strong association with adults’ employability, according to the OECD report. Yet, much like students across educational levels, for many adult learners math is a source of anxiety and a barrier to academic and career goals.

Drawing on mathematics reform research and models at the postsecondary level, an initial landscape review, and feedback from early course testing, ANDE has identified several opportunities for educators to rethink basic mathematics education for adults:

• Increase relevance: Adults need relevant and engaging ways to learn about and practice math that acknowledges and accesses their prior knowledge and personal experiences.

• Invest in instructor professional development: Instructors need professional development and ongoing support to build capacity with the content, implement research-based instructional approaches, and integrate technology tools into their teaching.

• Include technology: Learners and instructors need user-friendly and accessible technology tools in the classroom that provide targeted just-in-time support and immediate feedback to enhance math learning and problem-solving capacity.

• Build in more flexibility and support: Learners need greater supports to persist and complete courses once enrolled—in terms of course structures oriented to motivate progress and in-class practices that help learners navigate math anxiety, feel supported, and persist.

With these in mind, ANDE has worked with Pennsylvania adult educators and students over the last three years to develop and refine a new kind of numeracy course with accompanying educator supports that improves outcomes and builds robust mathematical reasoning and digital literacy skills for life. 

A Comprehensive Model of Change

The ANDE model takes a new approach to adult education that responds to the needs highlighted above. Key features of ANDE include the following:

• Comprehensive and relevant adult numeracy curriculum: ANDE offers adult educators a thoughtfully scaffolded adult numeracy curriculum designed to support students to learn and master basic numeracy skills through lessons that situate the math in real-world and relevant contexts familiar to adults, such as banking and budgeting, grocery shopping, home repair, and assessing news and data.

• Active, collaborative, and discussion-based instructional approach: Research shows that engaging in mathematical discourse enriches and strengthens student learning. The instructional approach used with ANDE moves away from teacher-directed instruction to encouraging adult learners to explore math and mathematical reasoning with each other through guided, practical, and concrete examples. 

• Personalized and targeted supports using technology: ANDE includes an online learning platform that offers learners opportunities for personalized practice, feedback on their attempts, and a chance to redo and review to master the content. Use of the platform and engagement with the lessons online not only deepens the math learning but also builds students’ ability to navigate technology.

• Supportive policies and practices: Informed by current research on adult motivation and persistence, the ANDE model encourages clearly defining term dates and offering condensed and accelerated courses. It also incorporates practices and routines to build supportive mindsets and learning environments (see the CIRCL package for resources that have been adapted for use in the adult education space).

• Ongoing professional development supports: Alongside the course, ANDE has created a professional development system that helps instructors build their capacity to not only teach this course but to implement best practices in mathematics instruction for adults. Instructors receive initial training as well as ongoing coaching, tailored instructor resources to support the new instructional approach, and connection with peer educators to share experiences and troubleshoot.

Anecdotal evidence from early testing has shown that elements of the model are already having an impact. Reflecting on the student learning experience, one adult educator noted how the focus on relevance is helping students think about math differently: “Everybody hates math when they come into the GED class. I think [ANDE] changes their perceptions because they see these are some of the things they do in their lives every day.”

Meanwhile, instructors are learning effective approaches to support student learning. One educator shared, “I really like the [emphasis on] talking about math rather than just ‘Here’s a problem. Solve it.’” Another focused on their ability to better understand the mathematical reasoning process and their students’ thinking: “​​It helps me understand more as to mathematical reasoning so I’m able to explain it a little bit more, instead of saying, ‘this is how you do it’ and ‘that will get you the right answer and that’s all you need to worry about.’”

A Path Forward for Adult Mathematics Education 

Foundational skills building is essential for adult learners, and adult basic education offers a path to get there. Still, there are important questions about how instructors, administrators, policymakers, and researchers can reimagine the adult education space and create the conditions for high-quality learning to happen more reliably. 

ANDE highlights clear opportunities to enhance how we deliver adult mathematics education. Following pilot testing this year, we look forward to sharing insights on the effectiveness of ANDE’s course model in deepening math and technology skills and improving learner outcomes. With more understanding of what strengthens adult numeracy learning, we hope to support adult educators and students nationwide with evidence-based strategies and resources that help reverse the trend of declining adult numeracy skills. 

 

Adult Numeracy in the Digital Era (ANDE) is a project supported by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education through Award #R305N210029.

To learn more about this and other research work that Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd is engaged in, sign up for our In Sum newsletter.

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The challenges of scaling effective interventions and innovations in postsecondary institutions are well known (Asera et al., 2013). In this blog post, drawing upon insights from the NSF-funded Scaling Up through Networked Improvement (SUNI) project, we share two leadership practices that are key to scaling efforts. This knowledge will provide practitioners with tools and insights they can put in action today, and it will provide researchers with a new lens to view leadership for change.

Prior research tells us about the importance of collaborative, shared, distributed leadership for spreading innovation in their institutions. Leaders who seek to share the burden of leadership and decision-making have to build trust and attend to hierarchies if they want to effectively engage others in leadership work (Kater & Burke, 2022; Lizier et al., 2022). If leaders want to put in place innovations that have proven promising or effective, they must also pay attention to existing and changing policy and institutional structures at their college (Asera et al., 2013). 

But how exactly do leaders attend to these structures and relationships that can make or break efforts to scale? The research tells us what leaders ought to do, but we need to understand how they do it. 

Through the SUNI study, our research team sought to answer this question by focusing on practices. We define practices as actions that are simultaneously structured and that structure further action: instead of debating between whether leaders’ actions are dictated by their environments or whether leaders can actively shape those environments, we view practices as a way to understand how both are true at the same time (Feldman & Worline, 2016). 

We studied efforts to scale the Carnegie Math Pathways (CMP) across three colleges to understand what actions leaders were taking and the way those interactions were simultaneously constrained and enabled by their environments. The Carnegie Math Pathways, a reform of development mathematics involving the implementation of innovative math pathways, uses an evidence-based, collaborative instructional approach and contextualized curricula to create a supportive and engaging math learning experience that helps students persist and succeed in gateway college math. 

To understand how leaders came to shape the scaling efforts of their math pathways we conducted interviews with institution leaders and faculty, conducted site visits, and looked at meeting artifacts and meeting notes. Our analysis revealed that two practices were central to whether scaling efforts broke down or succeeded: tracking and leveraging. Tracking refers to how leaders pay attention to the institutional policies, practices, and structures that might get in the way of or help advance scaling efforts. Leveraging, on the other hand, refers to how leaders use those institutional policies, practices, and structures to support or inhibit scaling practices. 

Our analysis revealed a wide range of factors that leaders tracked at their institution and the very specific ways they sought to leverage those factors to advance the position of their math pathways to scale. 

In this blog post, we highlight a particularly successful case: Northern Technical College (NTC). NTC was wildly successful at scaling the math pathways reforms. The college offered just two sections (enrolling 27 total students) of the Carnegie Math Pathways quantitative reasoning course, Quantway Core, in the fall of 2019. In the fall of 2021, and in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic no less, NTC had increased enrollments to over 200 students in 14 sections of the course. We turn now to tell the story of how leadership at NTC scaled their math pathways. 

 

Northern Technical College’s Successful Implementation and Scaling of CMP 

At NTC, the math department chair, Theo played a crucial role in scaling Quantway. Theo was the first to learn of Quantway in the department and, at first, was reticent to introduce the course to NTC given local conditions—NTC permits the introduction of new courses only when those courses are requirements for a certificate or degree program. However, the college later adopted Guided Pathways, an institutional change framework prioritizing structured guidance in selecting and completing courses, which presented an opportunity for Theo. Courses across the college, including within the math department, would have to be remapped and reorganized to implement Guided Pathways. Shortly after the implementation of Guided Pathways began, Theo pitched Quantway to several departments, starting with the Culinary Arts department given his knowledge of the department’s mathematical needs and his personal connections to the department. As a result, the Culinary Arts program adopted Quantway as one of its required math courses. 

After beginning with just two sections for Culinary Arts students in the first year of Quantway implementation, Theo continued to pitch Quantway to other programs and departments whose mathematical needs were well-aligned with the objectives of Quantway. Within just two years, Quantway expanded from 2 to 14 sections. 

 

Tracking and Leveraging at NTC 

Prior to even considering whether to adopt Quantway, Theo carefully tracked institutional policies that might limit Quantway’s ability to scale, including a policy that disallowed courses to be added unless they were requirements for a degree or certificate program. This caused Theo to delay advocating for Quantway adoption at the college, waiting for conditions that would enable Quantway to be more favorably considered.

More than a year later, when NTC decided to implement Guide Pathways across the institution, Theo tracked this shift and saw it as an opportunity to introduce Quantway. Anticipating that program directors would now be looking for a math course that would meet their students’ and programs’ needs, Theo leveraged this insight to pitch Quantway as a solution well-aligned to particular areas of study. “Every program was meeting to redo their course mapping,” Theo remarked. “They had to look at what courses they were requiring because they were really asked to start looking at all of the programs within one pillar [to support Guided Pathways].” 

Theo’s approach to selling Quantway to program directors and other leaders was effective. Not only was Theo keenly aware of the work that programs would need to engage in to be aligned with Guided Pathways, but he also carefully tracked the mathematics that students would need in each program and targeted his pitches to programs for which Quantway would be an ideal fit. 

As a result, several leaders took up Theo’s recommendation to implement Quantway as a required math course for their degree and certificate programs. With over 200 students enrolled per term, Quantway has continued to grow into a core part of the college’s vision. 

 

Lessons for leadership development

This study illustrates the power of closely examining the practices of leaders, at all levels, seeking to advance or limit innovations. Surfacing how leaders do the work of scaling informs the kinds of practices that leaders need to engage in, or begin to develop, to effectively scale reform efforts. 

Those responsible for preparing and developing leaders can help leaders develop more effective tracking practices by designing learning experiences aimed at helping them see and analyze existing and emergent priorities and policies of their institution and its departments. This builds on work by Iverson and colleagues (2020) around providing leadership development to STEM faculty to develop wider views of the institution. Leadership development can also focus on developing leaders’ leveraging practice, helping them to reframe barriers and challenges into opportunities that can play a crucial role in transforming the student experience at their institutions. 

Tracking and leveraging are crucial practices that constitute the work of distributed, collaborative leadership.  By having leaders learn to develop relationships and understand needs that they then leverage, leaders can more effectively engage their institutions to advance innovations that benefit students.

Leadership is not just a set of dispositions and skills, but a set of practices. Our study argues, for both research and development purposes, that attention to what leaders are doing and what they could be doing differently is critical to understanding, initiating, and sustaining institutional change.

 

References

Asera, R., McDonnell, R. P., Soricone, L., Anderson, N., & Endel, B. (2013). Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College Innovation. Jobs for the Future.

Conrad, K. L., & LeMay, L. E. (2020). Lessons from the field: Leading institutional change from the middle. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 107-116.

Feldman, M., & Worline, M. (2016). The practicality of practice theory. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 15(2), 304-324.

Iverson, E. R., Bragg, D. D., & Eddy, P. L. (2020). How faculty change agents enact midlevel leadership in STEM. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 67-79.

Kater, S. T., & Burke, D. (2022). Getting to shared governance: New perspectives for implementing governance. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2022(200), 37-50.

Lizier, A., Brooks, F., & Bizo, L. (2022). Importance of clarity, hierarchy, and trust in implementing distributed leadership in higher education. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 17411432221105154.

McPhail, I. P., & McPhail, C. J. (2020). Strategic planning as a leadership development tool for midlevel leaders. New Directions for Community Colleges, 2020(191), 21-33.

 

SUNI: Scaling Up Through Network Improvement is a project funded by the National Science Foundation: IUSE (Institutional and Community Transformation, Development and Implementation). To learn more about the research work of Carnegie Math Pathways, sign up for our In Sum newsletter.

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This post first appeared on the WestEd Insights and Impact Blog and is posted here with permission. This version has been updated.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

(Philosopher Will Durant) 

Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd uses an evidence-based instructional approach to create a supportive and engaging math learning experience that helps students persist and succeed in college math. Pathways courses are taught using active, collaborative pedagogy supported through common curricula, an online platform, and rich instructional resources.   

Recently Pathways delved into the practices of leaders who effectively managed change during Math Pathways implementation. Over six years, supported by a National Science Foundation grant, we studied institutions and their approaches to change, including the unprecedented disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the study concludes, we’re excited to share seven practices we observed among leaders who successfully implemented change. 

Practice 1: Change Management 

What is change management? Change management is defined by the American Society for Quality (ASQ) as the methods and manners in which an institution describes and implements change. This includes preparing and supporting employees, establishing the necessary steps for change, and monitoring pre and post activities to ensure successful implementation (American Society for Quality, n.d.). 

Observations: One institution did a good job of preparing and supporting employees with the necessary steps for change but only did so in one part of the institution. Other areas learned about the change and were asked to adapt at the last minute with little preparation or explanation. Change leaders met great resistance, and the change failed shortly after it was launched. 

Takeaway: Effective change leaders receive training in change management and apply its principles contextually within their institutions. 

Practice 2: Personal and Institutional Relationships   

What is the importance of personal and institutional relationships for leaders? Successful change requires a collective, coordinated institutional effort, also known as “Distributed Authority.” Leadership occurs at all levels and champions exist in all spheres—the leader cannot do it alone.  

Observations: In one institution, two faculty leaders attempted to scale a successful pilot program. However, their limited understanding of the institutional context and lack of relationships beyond their own faculty sphere hindered their ability to establish collaborators and champions across various levels of the institution. Consequently, the change initiative failed to gain traction and was unsuccessful even before its launch. 

Takeaway: Successful change leaders have relationships across the institution and leverage distributed authority and empowerment to build capacity to lead change. 

Practice 3: Dynamic Stability, Monitoring, and Tracking 

What is dynamic stability? Successful change leaders use tracking to constantly adjust, scanning the horizon to attend to the various phases of a change initiative, such as planning, networking, exploring, and organizing. 

Observations: One institution included a group of mid-level leaders with multiple roles and responsibilities in the institution and a common interest in this change initiative. One leader tracked individual reactions and behavior to differentiate the vision and frame the solution for various audiences. Using this micropolitical competence, the leader was able to adjust the approach as necessary for different audiences. The leader also networked to create synergy between the change initiative and the personal agendas and department cultures in the institution and monitored what features were important to different individuals. These behaviors allowed the leader to track the circle of engagement, gauge the depth of their interest in the initiative, and adjust the leader’s narrative when necessary.     

Takeaway: Effective change leaders use tracking and monitoring to plan, network, explore, and organize while leading organizational change. 

Practical 4: Political Savvy 

What does it mean to be politically savvy? Micropolitical literacy is an individual’s ability to use strategies to navigate organizational processes and structures to serve their interests. 

Observations: One institutional leader was an astute micropolitical negotiator. As a respected and trusted storyteller in the organization, this leader was able to engage key interested parties early in the change initiative to create a shared vision and common understanding. This leader was a collaborator and built strong relationships across the institution through ongoing networking by genuinely investing in personal and professional relationships. By leveraging these qualities, this leader gathered and built support for this change initiative, maintained the project as a high-priority initiative, honored individual contributions, and navigated through tense challenges successfully during this organizational change. 

Takeaway: Effective change leaders use micropolitical literacy as they network while leading organizational change. 

Practice 5: Communication Effectiveness  

What does communication effectiveness entail?  Successful change leaders develop their own communication skills and utilize institutional resources, such as communications and marketing departments, to convey important messages effectively. 

Observations: In one institution, the absence of communication had significant consequences. Despite Math Pathways having institutionwide implications, the change was treated as a math department matter. Consequently, when the change was implemented, others within the institution were caught off guard. Advisers struggled to guide students to the right courses, and the course scheduler faced difficulties arranging suitable classrooms for collaborative learning at the last minute. Unnecessary chaos ensued. 

Takeaway: Successful change leaders use effective communication to surface potential problems before they happen and to build engagement and belief in the change. 

Practice 6: Self-Awareness  

What is self-awareness for leaders? The self-aware leader understands their own character, feelings, motivations, and desires. They understand that, in similar circumstances, other people may have very different feelings, motivations, and desires. They understand their positionality and act accordingly. 

Observations: In one institution, a charismatic president commanded respect and admiration. However, due to an unintentional power dynamic, people were hesitant to deviate from the president’s lead. When offered coaching, the president declined, asserting self-sufficiency. When we suggested that the team could get the coaching instead, the leader offered them the choice. However, the team also rejected the coaching, not because they didn’t want it, but because the leader unwittingly made it untenable for the team to do it if the leader did not. This leader was unaware of their impact on the team. They believed they were giving the team a choice, but the team saw only one option—to follow the leader. 

Takeaway: Self-aware change leaders understand and address what motivates people in adopting or rejecting change.  

Practice 7: Utilizing Supports Such as Coaching   

What is coaching? Coaching is performance-driven support that seeks to bring the individual being coached to a different level of competence in terms of learning new skills or knowledge to help them maximize their personal and professional potential. The focus is on concrete issues such as effectively managing change, engaging employees, or learning to think strategically.   

Observations: Institutional leaders who are open and willing to try new strategies even in the middle of a storm can learn and benefit through the experience. During the pandemic, when many institutions were sticking to the basics and narrowing their focus, one institution’s leader kept the initiative on track by leveraging administrative supports such as coaching to lead through the challenge. Through coaching and access to a network improvement community, this leader gained new information about how this innovation could be used to solve their course access challenge. Through coaching the leader examined new concepts such as change management and methods to understand and engage key interested parties, all of which helped to maintain the momentum in scaling even through a pandemic.   

Takeaway: Successful change leaders gain capacity through supports such as executive coaching. 

Next Steps  

Reflect upon your own leadership practices and consider how you implement each of the seven practices. Identify areas where support may be beneficial, and proactively seek out resources such as coaching to enhance your leadership capacity. 

To delve deeper into successful change implementation for leaders, we encourage you to explore the resources listed below. We also welcome you to contact Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd for more information on institutional coaching opportunities.

 

Additional Resources 

Buller, J. L. (2015). Change leadership in higher education: A practical guide to academic transformation. Jossey-Bass. 

Kotter, J. (2012). Leading change. Harvard Business Review Press. 

Kotter, J. (2013). Change: What really leads to lasting personal transformation. Oxford University Press. 

Kotter, J., & Cohen, D. (2012). The heart of change: Real-life stories of how people change their organizations. Harvard Business School Publishing. 

Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2017). The leadership challenge (6th ed.). Jossey-Bass. 

References 

American Society for Quality. (n.d.). What is change management? https://asq.org/quality-resources/change-management 

 

• What place does social justice teaching and learning have in a math class? 
• How can I promote productive and respectful exploration of social justice topics and concepts with my students?
• How can I help my students see the connection between the math we’re learning and its application in society?

These are some of the key questions addressed in Carnegie Math Pathways’ new guide, Mathematics With, About, and For Social Justice, and the accompanying designers’ webinar.

Developed by leading experts organized by Carnegie Math Pathways and with support from Strong Start to Finish, this new guide and webinar present a framework to understand how mathematics and social justice are intertwined as well as strategies and resources to help you create productive and impactful social justice-focused math learning experiences. 

Gain tools and tips to:

• create an equitable classroom culture that values different perspectives, supports student agency and belonging, and enhances the critical thinking of each and every student;
• manage and focus challenging conversations on the instructional goals; and
• help students see mathematics as a tool to address real-world issues.

We’d like to thank our expert panel for their work to develop these resources:

• Shandy Hauk, Associate Professor of Mathematics at San Francisco State University and Senior Researcher at WestEd
• Lily Khadjavi, Chair and Professor of Mathematics, Loyola Marymount University
• David T. Kung, Director, Policy at the Dana Center
• Victor Piercey, Professor of Mathematics and the Director of General Education at Ferris State University
• John Staley, Coordinator, Baltimore City Public Schools

We encourage you to explore the guide and check out the webinar recording for a walk through of the elements of the guide.

VIEW THE GUIDE

Recently, Jasmine Prasad, vice president of legislative affairs for the Student Senate for California Community Colleges, urged the many colleges still placing students in remedial courses to stop presenting this as a positive option and instead enroll students in transfer-level courses that provide the best possible path for college success.

We couldn’t agree more because we’ve seen firsthand the power corequisites have in providing students supportive transfer-level options that improve college math completion rates. Students in Carnegie Math Pathways corequisites, for example, earn college credit at over three times the rate of students in traditional remedial math sequences, and in a fraction of the time. But achieving these outcomes takes more than just a shift in course structure. It takes investing in faculty and supporting them with the resources they need to successfully teach corequisite courses.

When institutions adopt corequisite math programs, they’re undertaking a fundamentally different, more equitable approach than traditional remedial math sequences. Corequisite education, in particular, is enabling thousands of students to enroll directly into college-level courses while receiving the targeted supports they need to earn college credit in a single term. While coreq models have shown tremendous promise at leveling the playing field for many more college students, we must acknowledge that they are intensive and demand new skills of educators. It is for this reason that Carnegie Math Pathways provides educators with professional training and development opportunities to ensure their experience in the classroom is successful.

In Pathways corequisite courses, specifically, educators use evidence-based active and collaborative learning methods to have students work through real-world math problems together—a wholly different approach from the rote, lecture-based approach to math teaching. But we don’t simply hand off materials to educators and expect them to become experts overnight. Through a structured system of peer-led training, faculty mentorship, and ongoing professional development, we help educators build the skills, strategies, and comfort they need to command this new and impactful instructional approach. And perhaps most importantly, we help foster a community across institutions in which educators are able to connect with and support one another in their practice.

In more than a decade of working with educators, we’ve learned that investment in faculty training and professional development is vital for ensuring that proven reforms like corequisite math remediation can succeed at scale. The results of this community of support for faculty have been profound. With robust resources and a community rallying behind them, educators not only see higher course outcomes, but they develop stronger connections with their students, observe deeper learning and greater persistence in their classroom, and have a more positive teaching experience.

“The mentor assuaged my fears and helped me understand and refine the active learning and group management techniques that I was using. Then, after a little more professional development, I was ready to be a mentor myself. This experience enabled growth and change that made my classroom teaching a lot more rewarding.”

Such was the case with Read Vanderbilt, a Statway corequisite instructor and math faculty at Diablo Valley College in California. Vanderbilt says that while educators may have taken a professional development course on group learning, putting the approach fully into practice can be really challenging. Yet with dedicated, ongoing support, educators can build their confidence as facilitators of group learning and help their students reach new heights.
“Carnegie Math Pathways provided me with weekly communication with a mentor in my first year, which made all the difference,” he said.

“The mentor assuaged my fears and helped me understand and refine the active learning and group management techniques that I was using. Then, after a little more professional development, I was ready to be a mentor myself. This experience enabled growth and change that made my classroom teaching a lot more rewarding.”

The adoption of accelerated corequisites to expand access to transfer-level math is a change for educators, but the prospects they hold for helping thousands more students advance in their education, particularly those most harmed by the status quo, cannot be denied. California colleges owe it to their students to provide them with the best course options to help them reach their goals, but they also owe their faculty and instructors the resources and supports they need to successfully implement these courses.

 

How can we get high school students who feel shut out from higher education to even consider applying to college? One way is to enroll them directly in a college-level course while still in high school. That’s what we’re learning through newly imagined dual enrollment partnerships between high schools and colleges. 

Typically, dual enrollment math programs are seen as another form of advanced placement, reserved only for those students deemed “accelerated” or who are already on a path to college. And in many districts, racial participation gaps between White students and their Black and Latino peers persist. Over the past several years, however, Carnegie Math Pathways has collaborated with educators to make dual enrollment math programs more equitable by expanding eligibility to enroll and making course content more relevant and engaging to high school students.

Throughout these experiences, we’ve learned important lessons that could help you design or rethink your dual enrollment math program to create more equitable opportunities for students to attend and succeed in college. Below, we outline just some of our learning, shared during a recent webinar hosted by Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE).

Dual enrollment math content can be more than algebra and calculus

Although an increasing number of colleges, if not most, offer alternative math pathways such as statistics or quantitative reasoning, many dual enrollment math programs are still reserved for students on a path to calculus. But imagine how many more students could discover their potential to succeed in college if they could choose from more math options than just algebra.

Consider Fremont High School in California. At Fremont, two years of math are required for graduation, but three are required for admission to California universities. Because failure rates in Algebra II, Fremont’s third-year math offering, were so high, students were not earning enough math credits to qualify for local college admission. And its reputation discouraged students from even enrolling in Algebra II. 

To give students more options to choose from and encourage them to continue their math education, Fremont implemented a dual enrollment math program with statistical reasoning content using Statway. This led to greater enrollment in third-year math and more students earning college math credit while still in high school. By offering topics other than algebra, statistical and quantitative reasoning courses like Statway and Quantway can appeal to students who previously thought college was out of reach, and even help them get ahead in their college-level math studies. 

We must build students’ identities as college students both in and out of the classroom

Students who haven’t considered college as an option or hadn’t considered themselves as potential college students generally have much to learn about the expectations and requirements of the college setting. It is incumbent upon us as educators to clearly communicate course expectations, norms, and grading requirements and make content and pedagogy inclusive. Further, the entire system built around a dual enrollment program—advising and placement, for example—needs to be ready for students who may not be comfortable or familiar with the college registration process and may not have anyone to assist them with it.

Both the in-class environment and out-of-classroom supports are crucial to building students’ identity as college students and their self-confidence and self-efficacy as math learners.

Anticipate and prepare for the administrative planning of your dual enrollment program

Even with the most dedicated high school and college administrators working together to increase college access and success, policy and bureaucracy can get in the way. We have encountered two common challenges in this arena. The first is cost. Even if the course itself is paid for, student materials may not be. In many cases, this has left institutions scrambling to find grant funding to pay for student materials. It is important to consider cost at the outset of a dual enrollment program, and it is vital to aim for a program that comes at no cost to students. This is an issue that goes beyond what individual educators and administrators can undertake on their own and needs to be addressed at the state policy level. Ample research, such as The Dual Enrollment Playbook, can help you make the case to your school district leaders or state representatives to support you with lowering costs to students for dual enrollment programs.

The second is the decision about whether high school or college instructors should teach the course and where. College instructors may not have experience teaching high school students and may not be paid to participate in activities outside of instruction, such as coordinating with the high school teacher. Meanwhile, having high school students on college campuses may expose them to the college experience but transportation obstacles can dramatically reduce participation for many of the students we’re trying to reach. There are many approaches schools can take. At Fremont, the dual enrollment course is taught at the high school by a math teacher who is also an adjunct faculty at the partner college. 

* * *

While we can tell students repeatedly that they’re capable of going to and succeeding in college, the dual enrollment experience can show them they can. We can appeal to students’ interests with real-world curricula. We can support them in and out of the classroom to meet college-level expectations. And we can work behind the scenes to ensure that the program’s administrative aspects—like where to teach a dual enrollment class—are designed to support student success. 

A carefully designed dual enrollment program can show students who’ve never dreamed of attending college, let alone succeeding in that setting, that they are capable of doing just that. The ripple effects could be transformative—more equitable access to college, more diversity at college campuses, and more educated citizens.

 

Evidence shows that building students’ sense of belonging in the classroom is crucial to their success, particularly in math, one of the most feared and maligned subjects. These anxieties and negative outlooks on math can be exacerbated in online courses, where students can feel even less connected to the instructor and their classmates as they learn at a distance. 

In our latest Quality Instruction webinar, we discussed the supports and interventions that the Pathways community has found to be effective in fostering students’ sense of belonging, and how these have been adapted online to support learners from the beginning of the term, right to the end. Below, we offer some of the practical strategies you can use to build up your students’ sense of belonging in online courses and help them feel ready to succeed.

Provide a welcome package

The start of the term can set the tone for the rest of the course, and thoughtfully considering how you’ll first engage students in your course is critical to establishing a welcoming learning environment. In Pathways courses, we think of the elements that support student belonging at the start of each course as being part of a package—what we call “Starting Strong.” This package supports students in the first weeks of the course to develop the mindset and skills needed to succeed in a college course. The following are key elements of a course welcome package that we’ve found most impactful for creating an inclusive and connected online learning community.

A clear, intuitive course landing page. The course landing page presents an opportunity to clearly establish expectations and lay foundations on which to build community and belonging with and among your students. On this page, we suggest including a welcome video to introduce yourself and the course to your students; activities such as a syllabus scavenger hunt to orient students to the platform and a “get to know you” activity in which students can meet one another; and clear next steps on how to begin the course.

Predictable and visible course structure. A “learning cycle” describes learning as happening in phases, where students improve their skills by engaging in a predictable, and repeatable cycle of learning activities. In Pathways courses, students follow the same learning cycle in every unit of each module, establishing a predictable pattern that enables them to focus their energy on the content and working with their peers rather than on navigating the course structure. By mapping the learning cycle and representing it visually in your courseware, you can make the course environment familiar for students, which can contribute to their continued engagement.

Course orientation. Instructor-led orientation sessions scheduled during Week 1 of your courses provide a chance to talk through course expectations and give students another opportunity to be visible in the learning space, ask questions, and strengthen connections with you, their peers, and the key course processes. 

Investing in these early measures to welcome students and create an inclusive learning community sets the stage to help students productively engage throughout the course and feel like they belong.

Promote a growth mindset

Beyond Starting Strong, or the course welcome package, Pathways courses implement Staying Strong, a package of resources and interventions to help students maintain their confidence and motivation beyond the first weeks to successfully complete the course. An important component to ensuring students “stay strong” is an emphasis on growth mindset.

A growth mindset describes the belief that one is capable of learning a given subject and even excelling at it. Because students who have previously struggled with math tend to believe they can’t master the content, it’s important to show them evidence to the contrary and instill a growth mindset*—especially in online courses where students spend less time with the instructor, who can provide encouragement. One way we do this in Pathways courses is by sharing an article with students that describes the malleability of the brain, even in adulthood, and that individuals can improve their abilities in anything as long as they practice and use good learning strategies. Students have reported experiencing a newfound outlook on their ability to do math after reading the article.

Provide wise feedback

Another important factor to helping students persist in the course is ongoing, constructive feedback. Because online courses are more limited in their face-to-face interactions, the feedback given to students carries even more weight. Consequently, we must be mindful that our well-intentioned feedback does not inadvertently convey low expectations for our students. In Pathways courses, we promote “wise” feedback, which consists of phrases that communicate that the class has a high standard and that you believe that the student is capable of meeting that standard. By communicating to students that they’re capable of excelling in a rigorous course, wise feedback fortifies for students the belief that they can achieve and do belong in your course. 

Share emotion regulation and metacognitive learning strategies

Students’ sense of belonging in online classes is also strongly influenced by how they respond to everyday learning activities of the course, and how comfortable they feel engaging with them. Learning in an online environment can present new challenges to students and we can support them by proactively discussing strategies to learn in an online setting.

The first set of strategies we introduce in Pathways courses is emotion regulation strategies to respond to stress in a healthy way. Engaging with rigorous material can be frustrating at times and may even heighten existing levels of anxiety if the student believes that stress is a sign of impending failure. In our Stress Reappraisal intervention, we share research with students that shows that the physiological signs of stress are also signs that you are preparing to take on a challenge, as opposed to running from one. Engaging in this reading and writing activity, relative to a similar control article, significantly boosted students’ performance on exams. By presenting information to your students about how stress works and how they can regulate it, you can help them discover healthy ways of managing it that benefit them throughout the course and beyond. 

The second set of strategies focuses on developing metacognitive awareness. Metacognition refers to how students are thinking about their thinking. Being able to identify and then address gaps in their learning can bolster a student’s confidence and identity as a learner. We have integrated self-regulation prompts in all online assignments as well as before synchronous collaboration sessions that challenge students to assess their confidence with specific math concepts.

Recap

As more students seek to carry out their education online, it’s incumbent upon us to move beyond the message board or comments section to engage them in meaningful online learning that welcomes them and makes them feel they have a place in class. By fostering students’ sense of belonging with strategies such as these, we can move toward online courses that build a stronger sense of community and lead to greater student success.

 

To learn more about other ways Carnegie Math Pathways courses engage online learners, read our learning brief Narrowing the Distance in ‘Distance Learning’: Lessons from Carnegie Math Pathways on Designing for Student Success Online. And be sure to sign up for our monthly newsletter, In Sum, to stay informed about additional research and learning from Carnegie Math Pathways.

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*It’s important to note that promoting a growth mindset does not imply that students can succeed just by changing their beliefs. Much more factors into their success, including quality of instruction. We recommend exploring the research of Carol Dweck, the originator of the growth mindset framework, for further learning in this area.

Students are increasingly pursuing their education online. Although wide-ranging distance learning options offer learners flexibility and increased access to education, research shows that failure and withdrawal rates are sharply higher in online courses than in equivalent in-person courses, including for developmental math. For distance learning to fulfill its promise to students, online math learning must be rethought.

Carnegie Math Pathways has designed and tested a new approach to online learning that moves away from the traditional asynchronous learning model, which provides few supports to enable student success. Adapting principles that have proven to be effective in in-person course models, Carnegie Math Pathways has developed online courses focused on promoting connection and belonging.

This new brief highlights some of the key learnings from the design and implementation of online Carnegie Math Pathways courses as well as recommendations for how educators can support community and collaboration online in order to narrow the distance and promote student success.

Read the Brief

View the recording of our webinar, Online But Not Alone, to explore this topic further!

A central goal of California’s AB 705, passed in 2017, was to ensure that all students complete transfer-level English and math classes within a year, without first taking remedial courses. In fact, it requires that colleges place students into courses where they have the greatest likelihood of completing transfer courses, and restricts them from requiring remediation that delays students’ progress toward a degree. In July, EdSource reported that a majority of the state’s community colleges are still not yet fully implementing the requirements of this law.

It can be challenging for colleges to wade through uncharted waters and make the systemic changes needed to meet the law’s requirements. But proven solutions and resources are available to help institutions rise to the challenge. At a number of schools, these waters have already been charted, mapped, and skillfully navigated through partnerships with research-based organizations, and the implementation of solutions shown to help students succeed directly in transfer-level math courses.

Over the past decade, tens of thousands of students have succeeded in Carnegie Math Pathways Quantway and Statway courses, regardless of their original math placement level. We’ve served nearly 80,000 students, with 3 to 4 times as many of those students earning college math credits as those in traditional math sequences. We’ve helped institutions achieve these outcomes with a holistic approach. Our pedagogy centers student collaboration and provides social-emotional support to elevate students’ confidence and sense of belonging. We also build strong relationships with faculty, assist administrators with rethinking placement, and critically examine our student data.

And we’re not the only organization helping colleges transform their approaches to traditional math remediation. The California Acceleration Project (CAP), is a professional development network that exists specifically to support California’s community colleges with increasing completion and equity by transforming remediation. CAP has worked with all 115 California community colleges to implement reforms aimed at increasing student completion of transferable, college-level math and English requirements.

The Dana Center provides support to help educators successfully implement math pathways, with targeted efforts at the institution and state levels. Recently, Dana created a toolkit designed to help institutions successfully implement corequisite math courses. This comprehensive resource, supported by Strong Start to Finish, provides practical tools and profiles of institutions that have made this change. (Carnegie Math Pathways served as a contributor and on the national board of advisors for this toolkit.)

We owe it to our students to give them the best possible chance of success in college. It’s true that AB 705 has prompted the need for big change. But the evidence shows that this type of change is not just possible, it can lead to greater success for students. And while change isn’t necessarily easy, a wide array of supports from organizations like ours, CAP, the Dana Center, and others exist to help institutions with everything from placement, to advising, to instruction. Choosing to not meet the requirements of AB 705 is choosing to uphold the status quo, which has barred hundreds of thousands of students, especially Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students and those experiencing poverty, from completing their degree simply because well-intentioned, but ill-designed remediation courses hold them back. We owe it to our students to do what we so often ask of them in class—to dispassionately evaluate quantitative evidence and act on it.