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Carnegie Math Pathways Courses Are Now Open Educational Resources (OER): What This Means for Math Educators

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Carnegie Math Pathways Courses Are Now Open Educational Resources (OER): What This Means for Math Educators

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Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd recently released its course solutions, Statway and Quantway, as Open Educational Resources (OER). The materials are openly available now, just in time for instructors to consider implementing the curricula for fall 2024 courses.

So what is OER, why does it matter that Statway and Quantway are available as OER, and how will students and educators be served by this transition? Dan Ray and Lewis Hosie, Carnegie Math Pathways’ Operations Director and Development and Implementation Director, respectively, discuss the basics of OER, Statway and Quantway, and why the decision to go OER is such an important step toward creating a more equitable system of mathematics education that empowers all students to advance toward their goals.

Can you begin by telling us what Open Educational Resources are?

Hosie: Open Educational Resources, or OER, are part of a philosophy grounded in sharing, equity, and access within the education space. An open license can be applied to the result of any creative endeavor—for example, you might see a license that indicates openness on anything from photographs to code to a piece of fiction writing. In the education context, we think of OER materials as teaching, learning, and research materials that have a license that grants users access to those materials at no cost and, depending on the license, permission to modify, update, and/or rebuild those materials.

In addition to making curricular materials more affordable and accessible to all students, OER has contributed to the increased adoption of open practices in general, such as open peer review processes and open access publishing of research findings, across the education space.

Why did Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd decide to license its courses as OER now?

Ray: For over a decade, Carnegie Math Pathways has researched and tested specific solutions designed to help more students succeed and advance in their education. We initially partnered with educators to develop Statway and Quantway and have since worked to improve and study the impact of the curricula, the instructional approach, and the social and emotional elements of learning, which together make up our course solutions.

We’re now at a stage where we feel that Statway and Quantway have demonstrated their effectiveness. We have years of evidence showing that the approach and curriculum have been impactful.

However, we’ve also received feedback about hurdles to utilizing the course solutions. To teach the courses, institutions had to be a part of the research program, so we had to enter into agreements with institutions that required institutional buy-in, which was a barrier for some faculty who were ready to jump on board, but didn’t have decision-making authority. Another barrier was the costs, which were often passed along to students and could be prohibitive for them.

So it made a lot of sense for us to open access to Statway and Quantway curricular materials while maintaining the instructional approach and supports. Making our research and the course materials available through a CC BY-NC license—a type of Creative Commons license—will ease course adoption and alleviate some of the financial burden on students.

You mention that you’re maintaining the instructional approach and supports. Let’s talk a bit about Statway and Quantway. What are they, what are the approach and supports that are used, and why will open access to these course solutions be helpful to students and educators?

Ray: Quantway and Statway are sets of course curricula around either quantitative reasoning, which is the Quantway curricula, or statistical reasoning, which is the Statway curricula.

The thing that really makes them different is their approach. First, these courses are designed to be taught in a way that is active and collaborative, different from the lecture-based, direct instructional approach many might think of in mathematics. The instructor for a Statway or Quantway course is seen as a facilitator of conversation and learning. The materials are highly contextualized for relevancy, so instead of doing mathematical procedures in isolation, students are discussing mathematical approaches to solving problem tasks situated in familiar and real-world scenarios. In traditional instruction, the word problems are often at the end of the lesson, whereas in Statway and Quantway, the word problems start the lesson, engaging students right away. Contextualized problem situations enable students to clearly see the applicability of the mathematics.

Second, our approach pays attention to social and emotional learning, from community building to fostering a growth mindset to addressing challenges like math and test anxiety. Exercises and reflective activities are embedded throughout the courses to address and attend to these noncognitive aspects of learning, making them a seamless part of the learning experience for students.

Hosie: There’s something particularly impactful about what the Quantway and Statway “special sauce” produces in terms of mathematics learning experiences.

Working within a network of institutions, we would hear from students and instructors about students’ Quantway or Statway learning experiences. We would hear that students’ relationship with mathematics was completely transformed, shifting entirely from someone who does not believe they’re capable of doing or liking mathematics to someone who looks forward to going to the grocery store or consuming data from a news report because they can apply mathematics to that situation and make sense of it. We know this has happened for thousands of students over the decade of Carnegie Math Pathways’ existence.

And now, with these materials being OER, those experiences are going to be available for a much larger number of students. It’s not just about cost. It’s about providing educators and students everywhere with access to an engaging and empowering math learning experience.

What supports do you offer educators to help them fully adopt and utilize Statway and Quantway for their classrooms?

Ray: Carnegie Math Pathways’ offers professional development focused on helping instructors who are new to teaching in this way. If an instructor picks up this curriculum, they’re probably going to look at it and think, ‘Wow, this looks quite different from what I’m used to.’ Viewing themselves as a facilitator is probably a new experience for many, and building social and emotional supports into the curricula may be new as well. We want to support instructors in making that transition.

That’s why we offer training for faculty new to this approach. These trainings are always led by experienced Quantway and Statway instructors, ensuring that faculty learn from those who are actively teaching these courses.

We also want to help educators use the OER materials effectively. Many faculty are familiar with the notion of OER, but might not be as familiar with licensing and permissions. So we have a resource bank that instructors can access through our OER website that explains what the license provides in terms of permissions and gives examples of recommended ways for attribution to be given on modifications made to the materials.

Similarly, it’s important to convey how we envision modification and adaptation of the materials. We’ve provided guidance for faculty around key considerations for redesign projects. We want to empower instructors to remix and modify these resources to best serve their students while knowing there are resources to guide their modifications.

Hosie: We believe instructors have the desire and the expertise to take ownership over the materials. But they won’t be on their own. As Dan mentioned, we provide just-in-time support so they can make sense of the scope of an idea they have and determine what it would take to implement it while maintaining critical design and instructional aspects. In addition to static resources already available that help guide modification efforts, we are exploring ongoing professional development opportunities for faculty who want to enhance their course and task design knowledge to further support the tailoring of Statway and Quantway while maintaining the research-backed design and approach.

The curriculum materials have always been faculty driven, and this shift to OER is the most recent, perhaps most major, demonstration of that commitment to and belief in educators having ownership of the curricular materials they teach.

So what are the exciting elements of Statway and Quantway OER that you’d like educators to know about and take advantage of?

Hosie: Statway and Quantway OER give instructors the full range of freedom to mold these materials to best meet the needs of their students and institutional programs. For instance, if there’s an institution that has a focus on nursing career tracks, this shift to OER grants instructors at that institution the ability to infuse Statway or Quantway with rich and meaningful examples that are relevant to that career trajectory, which helps prepare students for subsequent courses and the workforce. It enables specific and authentic expertise to be built into and reflected in the curricular materials.

Additionally, we were very intentional about the format. Carnegie Math Pathways’ commitment to access and equity doesn’t stop at making the materials openly available through OER—we wanted to ensure a collaborative and easy-to-access learning space for students and educators to engage with the materials. We thought about the experience from the perspective of students and educators and evaluated which elements were needed to truly support the kind of collaboration we envisioned for these materials. That’s what led us to choose Google Docs for interaction with the materials. It is a familiar platform to most students and instructors, it enables users to access the materials via any device with an internet connection, sidestepping potential barriers to access, and it also gives instructors the ability to make as many copies as they need—including for themselves to play around with redesign or contextualization ideas. Or they can make copies to distribute to students.

Google’s integrated ecosystem makes engaging with these materials more seamless. For example, if each of the members of a study group open the same Google Doc, everyone can enter a Google Meet space from that document (if using Chrome), share their screen, and work through the mathematics together. This keeps the experience contained to a single online space without the need for multiple tools.

Another attractive built-in component is the extensive language translation features. When you go into a Google Doc and use the translation options, you can translate to almost any language in existence in a matter of seconds, although you still need to have a native speaker check the translation. This opens up intriguing opportunities and possibilities for expanding more equitable access both inside and outside the United States.

Ray: For example, we’ve been working with the University of the Free State in South Africa and have adapted versions of Quantway and Statway for the South African context. And we’ve engaged in similar cultural contextualization work with math faculty at tribal colleges here in the United States. You can imagine instructors from other countries and marginalized communities gaining access to these materials, potentially translating them, and modifying the problems to reflect their local communities and identities.

In terms of innovation, what excites me is the potential for what educators will do with these lessons. It really provides an opportunity to increase relevancy in ways that could be hyper-local to the institution and to the students taking these courses. Right now, we have some excellent examples of side-by-side lessons—one with the original context, one with a completely different context, but both with the same mathematical learning outcomes. We have very nice exemplars, but we are also developing more supports to really empower faculty to contextualize and localize the curricula.

Side by side lesson comparison of same lesson contextualized for different locations and learners - one on left featuring U.S. labor statistics to inform problems and one on the right using South African economic data to inform the problems.Carnegie Math Pathways’ move to OER helps enhance the accessibility and affordability of Statway and Quantway for students while empowering instructors to modify the curricula to best suit students’ needs and contexts.

Ready to get started? Explore Statway and Quantway OER and download the course materials.

 

Explore the OER materials

From Classroom to Workforce – Using Quantway to Prepare Students for Work and Beyond

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An innovative approach to help struggling students succeed

Learning loss impacted students and schools across the country, including Brooke Stewarts’. Stewart teaches mathematics within the alternative education program at Oak Creek High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

“Before COVID, nobody knew who the alternative education teachers were,” says Stewart. “And now, post-COVID, everybody knows us.” With the impacts of COVID on the K12 education system, many more high school students fell behind and educators have found themselves trying to get students caught up, filling learning gaps, and encouraging credit recovery to help students complete and advance beyond high school. Stewart notes that “because of this, alternative education has exploded.” 

Her school has long served students who are in need of credit recovery to continue on their education path. Yet, while credit recovery and course support helps some students return to, and complete traditional high schooling, it isn’t a solution for all students.

In 2020, she and a team of colleagues created an innovative competency-based diploma program designed specifically to meet the needs of students who have historically struggled in school. The program serves students in their junior year, who are not four-year college bound and are significantly lacking in credits to complete traditional high school. Stewart and her colleagues wanted to build something that would support this group of students to graduate with competitive skills and be ready to enter the workforce. “The goal is get them to be on a path of success rather than stuck in this cycle of failing classes, credit recovery, failing more classes, credit recovery.” 

Identifying the right math solution

The one-year program beginning in the second semester of a junior year, is focused on resumè building skills and preparing students for employment immediately after graduation. There is a work requirement; students participate in a shortened school day to accommodate their work schedule, and they have the opportunity to graduate one semester early based on successful completion of the program. With these incentives, Stewart and her colleagues, hope it will motivate students to persist and complete the program.

Critical to the programs’ success, though, was finding the right math course to support students on this path. For Stewart, it was necessary that the curriculum not only develop her students’ basic math skills, but that it connect the math to real world experiences that her students were going to need to know about. “I wanted this to be something where if they’re going into the trades, or if they’re going into any sort of technical degree, that they could use these skills, or even just [better understand and manage their] personal finances – how to make a budget, how to have a credit card.”

Stewart’s search led her to Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), a close partner of Oak Creek and located just down the street. There she learned about their use of Quantway Core for technical college students not requiring algebra for their field of study. The course appealed to her because of its highly relevant curriculum that focused on practical application of the math concepts and its collaborative learning approach. This seemed like the right option for her students.

Transforming mindsets on math and the future

Since Oak Creek’s competency program launched in 2021, Stewart has noticed a lot of positive changes in her Quantway students. In particular, she has seen dramatic shifts in students’ mindsets about math and their own math abilities. “I’ve noticed a lot of confidence boosts in my students. One student of mine told me she hated everything about math. And now, after going through this class, she saw the value in what we were doing. She was understanding the concepts and getting the big picture of why we need math. And she ended up doing awesome in the course.” 

These boosts are gratifying to Stewart, but even more meaningful is how this confidence has helped her students engage and persist in the course. Stewart sees how as her students build their math skills and collaboratively navigate the problem exercises in the curriculum they begin to connect how this matters for their lives and feel that what they are learning is worth their time and their effort. 

This program is having a profound impact on her students, and the transformation is motivating for Stewart. She enjoys being able to have conversations with her Quantway students about real world topics connected to the math they are learning. Their engagement and interest is also leading to changes in their attitude toward school as a whole and how they think about and plan for their future. While at the start of the program students may not have set goals for themselves, Stewart says this completely changes through the program, and when, two months before graduation, she asks students about their plans, she will now hear things like, “”Oh, I’m going to MATC. I’m going to study welding. And I’m starting on January 19th, and I’m going to do an apprenticeship in welding, and I’m going to get a job.”

For stories like this and to stay informed about Carnegie Math Pathways, sign up for our monthly newsletter, In Sum.

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New Partnership Between Dallas College and Carnegie Math Pathways Will Study Impact of Statway Corequisite Course

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Can a comprehensive instructional model make a difference for outcomes in corequisite courses? A new partnership between Dallas College and Carnegie Math Pathways aims to test this. 

Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd was recently awarded a $3.3M IES grant to conduct a multi-year assessment of the Statway instructional model. To complete the study, Carnegie Math Pathways has partnered with Dallas College to conduct a randomized control trial comparing statistics corequisite courses taught using Statway’s instructional model with more traditional instructional models.  

Evidence from the last several years shows that corequisites demonstrate great promise both in terms of expanding student access to entry-level college mathematics and providing an equitable solution to supporting students for course success. Yet, even as these courses are leveling the playing field for students, outcomes have been varied. 

This new study will assess the efficacy of the Statway model, including the collaborative pedagogy, applied, contextualized curriculum, embedded social emotional supports, and instructor supports. Examining implementation results from both face-to-face and fully online course delivery, the study aims to understand what impact this comprehensive approach to corequisite instruction may have on student success and instructors’ sense of self-efficacy. 

Dr. Narayan Thapa, Dean of Academic Affairs, Mathematics Sciences at the college says, “At Dallas College we’re committed to student success and improving learning to best serve all our students. We’re already making great strides with corequisite math, and the findings of this study will be instrumental in helping us determine how we can further improve students’ experiences and outcomes,” 

The 5-year study is in its second year, and so far approximately 700 students have enrolled. We look forward to sharing results as we learn.

To stay informed about this work and other Carnegie Math Pathways research efforts, sign up for our monthly newsletter, In Sum.

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A New Guide and Webinar to Help Educators Incorporate Social Justice in the Math Classroom

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  • 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

Moving Mathematical Mountains: A Decade of Educator-Led Change to Make Math a Gateway to Success for All Students

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For far too long and for far too many, particularly Black, Latinx, and Indigenous students, and students impacted by poverty, the traditional developmental math system has been a barrier to college completion, perpetuating inequalities in degree attainment and income. Since 2010, Carnegie Math Pathways has been committed to transforming this system of math teaching and learning in order to make math a gateway to success for ALL students.

In our latest Carnegie Math Pathways report, Moving Mathematical Mountains: A Decade of Educator-Led Change to Make Math a Gateway to Success for All Students, we show that changing the status-quo approach to math education is not only possible, but imperative to helping students not just pass college math but thrive academically, professionally, and personally. 

Working alongside educators for over a decade we’ve helped instructors, administrators, and institutions implement more equitable math learning by:

  • introducing math pathways aligned with majors, relevant to students’ lives, and to 21st century career paths;
  • engaging all students directly in college-level math, with the supports they need to be successful;
  • creating an active, collaborative learning experience centered on relatable and meaningful contexts;
  • attending to the needs of the whole learner through embedded social emotional learning supports that address key non-cognitive factors, such as growth mindset and belonging; and
  • supporting faculty and administrative leaders in transforming the student experience through rich professional learning and peer support. 

Moving Mathematical Mountains highlights the power of an educator-driven network and the impact of our community’s efforts through 10 years of outcome data, as well as student, faculty, and institutional feature stories. It synthesizes our learnings about what it takes to create and sustain equitable math reform and sets the stage for the exciting possibilities for the decade ahead. It shows us the potential of making lasting and impactful change in the service of students, something we as a field can learn from and continue to advance collectively to ensure more equitable learning and success in mathematics. 

READ THE REPORT

 

Greater Student Success Calls for Greater Investment in Faculty

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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.

 

3 Things We’ve Learned About Designing Effective Dual Enrollment Math Programs

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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.

 

What Carnegie Math Pathways Research is Revealing About Scaling Reform Successfully

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Too often, education initiatives that can drastically improve student outcomes succeed in a contained setting but fail to achieve those same results at scale. A study by Carnegie Math Pathways at WestEd is examining what conditions and support are needed for institutional leaders to implement promising innovations at scale effectively and sustainably.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and launched in 2018, the six-year Scaling Up through Networked Improvement (SUNI) project is providing leadership coaching to teams in two cohorts of two institutions to scale Carnegie Math Pathways course programs. The resulting evidence from the cases in the project is intended to shed light on effective approaches to implementing reform and change management at higher education institutions more broadly.

Early findings from this study have revealed several factors critical to enacting large-scale change effectively. These findings have practical value to college administrators seeking to scale proven solutions to bolster student success.

Rally support and buy-in from all stakeholder groups to ensure strong implementation.

Implementing reform at scale is more likely to happen when key decision-makers in multiple departments of the campus organization agree that the change is a worthy investment of effort and resources. For institutions participating in the SUNI study, it was clear that significant changes were needed to increase student success rates in developmental math, where many students’ education journeys were being derailed. Learn your department’s pain points and wishlists to develop ambitious but realistic goals that everyone can rally behind. 

Develop an implementation plan that defines and guides the scaling effort and helps minimize disruption amid leadership turnover.

Documenting shared goals, roles, and responsibilities can help leadership teams understand the scope of the work to be done, how it will get done, and by when. Using an implementation planning tool that project coaches introduced to the teams, institutions developed a guide to define and help steer the implementation of their reform. Inspired by the A3 management process developed by Toyota, this tool helps leaders develop shared goals, measures of success, and a means to communicate those goals and progress towards meeting them.

Since each leadership team created its implementation and scaling guide, the buy-in for the initiative was high. During times of change, such as when leaders transitioned to new positions, this guide has given new leaders a road map of the project, allowing them to quickly orient and keep the initiative on track. 

Nurture authentic engagement among your team with strong relationships and mutual trust.

Because scaling reform requires buy-in, it’s perhaps not surprising that fostering relationships built on trust and mutual respect is a key aspect of effective scaling. As we saw at one institution, when a key administrative leader consistently honored the contributions and positive impact of his team, it made them more willing and trusting participants in the reforms. Additionally, open and honest communication about the challenges and barriers that they faced along the way, and a willingness to consult with and accept input from colleagues, also helped strengthen support for the scaling effort. Before and throughout undertaking reform, evaluate relationships among your team and explore the resources available to strengthen them, such as professional development and coaching for leadership on team-building.

Ensure quality of communication and coordination between departments to maintain effective implementation.

Quality communication that supports transparency and coordination across stakeholders is essential to any reform endeavor. Early in the study, leaders at one institution discovered they were struggling with a lack of clarity about their roles and responsibilities for their reform initiatives, which led to unclear expectations. Through coaching and professional development facilitated by the project, these leaders identified ways to more concretely organize and communicate their needs, roles, and expectations to fulfill their program goals. As you consider embarking on reforms, evaluate the quality of communication among and between departments. What channels are they using, and are these channels effective at keeping your team(s) informed? What steps can be taken to improve the effectiveness of communication and the quality of coordination?

Continuously improve processes to sustain reform efforts.

With goals, challenges, and potential solutions subject to change quickly and at any moment, it’s critical to practice continuous improvement to sustain reform. When conditions that impact reform arise, recalibrating with colleagues is crucial not just for delivering the best possible outcome for students, but for keeping teams engaged, proactive, and joyful in their work of serving students. Continuous improvement means the regular evaluation and reevaluation of the considerations described above—maintaining buy-in, refining the implementation plan, nurturing strong relationships, and ensuring effective communication. Build in time to regularly monitor and assess what’s working and what isn’t so that the right improvements can be made at the right time.

In addition to these factors, the research reveals that engaging in coaching and networked learning (collaborative professional learning with peers), and extending these supports to entire leadership teams, is linked to the successful scaling of Carnegie Math Pathways programs. These insights remind organizational leaders that trust, communication, and shared goals are vital for sustaining large-scale reforms and building leadership capacity.

Throughout the next and final year of the study, participating leadership teams will continue to receive coaching and professional development support as they scale their Pathways programs. At the end of the study in 2023, the research team will publish the results to support institutional leaders in scaling ambitious reforms that can drastically improve student outcomes. 

To learn more about our findings to date, join our session at the 2022 NISOD International Conference on Teaching and Leadership Excellence. You can also subscribe to our monthly newsletter, In Sum, to stay informed about this work.

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New Grant Will Help Carnegie Math Pathways Support Instructors with Teaching Social Justice-Themed Math Lessons

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Carnegie Math Pathways has received a grant from Strong Start to Finish to develop a publicly available instructional guide to help educators effectively facilitate social justice-themed math lessons. 

The grant will fund an expert consultant to help design the guide, which will include strategies and frameworks to support educators with equitably engaging students to explore mathematics concepts contextualized in social justice themes and topics. The grant will also support a workshop—open to all educators—later this summer to explore the ideas and recommendations in this guide.

“We’re grateful to have SSTF’s support to help us advance more equitable instruction,” Karon Klipple, Executive Director of Carnegie Math Pathways, said.

“Math is a powerful means of helping students understand the world around them, including issues of social justice, and these resources will help teachers make mathematics more empowering and relevant for their students.” 

The grant builds on work that began in 2017 with the formation of Carnegie Math Pathways’ Social Justice Curriculum Committee. Comprised of educators within the Pathways’ national network of math practitioners, researchers, and administrators, the group developed a set of quantitative and statistical reasoning lessons situated in social justice contexts, such as gerrymandering and race and incarceration.

Since that time, lessons have been continuously improved and made available to educators in the Pathways network. With support from Strong Start to Finish, Carnegie Math Pathways will not only be able to support the implementation of Pathways-specific social justice lessons, but social justice-themed lessons more broadly.

The value of such lessons and guidance on how to facilitate them is clear—students learn how they can use math concepts to understand contemporary issues relevant to their lives, interests, and identities. And instructors receive the support they need to create welcoming learning environments that promote productive discourse around such complex topics. By understanding and applying equitable and culturally sustaining instructional practices, we can help more students feel empowered to participate in these types of lessons and feel like their perspectives and experiences are valued.

For students of color, adult learners, and other marginalized students, who may not see themselves or their communities represented in math curriculum or how math applies to problems they face, this is an important way to elevate visibility and help students feel that what they are learning in class can make a difference in their lives. And we know that when students feel supported and can engage in learning that they see as relevant, they are more likely to participate, persist, and succeed in their math course.

 

Online But Not Alone: Tips for Fostering Inclusion and Belonging in Online Math Courses

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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.

carnegie math pathways learning cycle

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. 

examples of wise and unwise feedback

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 online courses engage students, 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.

 

*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.