With the help of a new federal grant, Lesley University is partnering with Massachusetts community colleges to tackle one of America's biggest educational problems -- the chronic and widespread failure rates in developmental mathematics.
The 100% Math Project, funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE), is a partnership among the Massachusetts Community College system, Lesley University and Wellesley College. Cambridge-based software development company, EnabLearning, Inc., is the project's technology partner. The project is one of the largest FIPSE grants ever awarded -- $680,000 over three years.
"Students who struggle with math have a hard time completing their college education," says Lesley School of Education professor George Blakeslee. "Problems with math are a major contributor to student frustration, and can lead to high dropout rates."
Blakeslee and other project partners say the math problem must be approached from several angles. Students, for example, don't see the relevance of math in their daily lives, the faculty is increasingly part-time and inexperienced, and the initial assessment and placement process does not reflect individual students' needs, they say.
The 100% Math Project partnership will develop a new student placement protocol and offer a variety of instructional alternatives to serve students' specific learning styles, including standard classrooms, larger lectures by experienced faculty, completely individualized online or lab-based courses, and scheduled study groups for students who need specialized tutoring. Content also will change so that students can understand why math is important, and new tools will be created so students can better visualize math concepts.
Lesley's role is to provide professional development and on-going classroom support for faculty members. The project also aims at creating a strong collegial teaching environment to bring developmental math faculty together regularly to share teaching ideas, methods and content. Lesley will also have responsibility for project evaluation.
Over the course of the project, the 100% Math approach will be introduced at each of the Commonwealth's 15 community colleges. The project also includes the establishment of a Developmental Mathematics Institute to collect data, monitor progress and disseminate information so that similar projects can be implemented in other states. The 100% Math Project will eventually affect how developmental mathematics is taught in community colleges across the nation, according to the project leaders.
Nationwide, there are more than 2 million enrollments in developmental mathematics at community colleges - courses that include basic arithmetic, basic and intermediate algebra, the project's participants say. More than 15 percent of all community college students are enrolled in developmental math, and failure rates reach 50 percent.
In Massachusetts, 80 percent of all incoming community college students do not achieve the required proficiency in the initial mathematics placement test. Nearly half fail their first developmental math course and often drop out of college.
Lesley University (www.lesley.edu) is a 13,000-student, multi-site university for women and men. Anchored by a strong liberal arts curriculum, Lesley offers undergraduate and graduate programs in education, the arts, human services, and management at its Cambridge and Boston campuses and at more than 150 sites in 18 states. Lesley's six schools include the School of Education, the Graduate School of Arts and Social Sciences, the Adult Baccalaureate College, the School of Management, The Art Institute of Boston, and Lesley College, an undergraduate women's college.
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