Timeline

At the request of the Maryland General Assembly, the Maryland Higher Education Commission conducted a cost study of remedial education in FY 2011. The report found that community colleges spend over $7,000 per remedial student for a total of $75.3 million. Meanwhile, the USM institutions spend over $9,000 per student for a total of $14.0 million on remedial education.

This new law dictated that all public higher education institutions in Maryland implement policies requiring all enrolled college students to take their credit-bearing mathematics and English general education courses within the first 24 credit hours of study, and that students who are placed into developmental/remedial courses begin those courses during their first semester. In addition, the new law supported dual enrollment courses and transition courses (remediation in high school) with funding formulas that crossed between K-12 and higher education.

MMRI is a collaborative effort between the public four-year USM institutions and two-year community colleges in Maryland to develop and implement multiple high-quality mathematics pathways that are relevant for students’ chosen career paths, while also ensuring that the new courses have sufficient mathematical integrity and rigor to be deemed “college-level.”

Counting on Our Future, held on October 31, 2014, was a statewide P-20 conference addressing new ways of thinking about mathematics and quantitative literacy. This event featured a keynote address from Dr. Uri Treisman will discuss how recent developments, including the changing needs of the sciences, new research on how students learn mathematics, and data on student success, are driving many to rethink the structure and content of mathematics courses. This keynote and conference provided the impetus for a Call to Action to engage a statewide working group to redefine mathematics pathways in Maryland.

The MMRI Steering Committee charged a workgroup of mathematics experts to study national and state mathematics trends, initiatives, and data and make recommendations for necessary policy changes and future mathematics curricula. The workgroups included faculty from both community colleges and four-year universities, as well as some experts from the Dana Center and representatives from the USM, the Maryland Higher Education Commission, and the Maryland Independent Colleges and Universities Association.

The MMRI steering committee charged a small workgroup of two-year and four-year mathematics faculty to revise the Code of Maryland Regulations (COMAR) for general education mathematics to reflect a new understanding of quantitative literacy and allow for alternative pathways in mathematics education. In the existing regulations, Maryland required all undergraduates to take one course in mathematics “at or above the level of college algebra.” By naming a particular course—college algebra—the regulatory language limited options for pathways. The workgroup offered new regulatory language that was written to open rather than close options. The new language reads: “One course in mathematics, having performance expectations demonstrating a level of mathematical maturity beyond the Maryland College and Career Ready Standards in Mathematics (including problem-solving skills, and mathematical concepts and techniques) that can be applied in the student’s program of study.” That change in regulation was the key to remedial education reform efforts in Maryland.

In late 2015, the University System of Maryland was awarded $3 million dollars from the United States Department of Education to support the development of the pathways courses and a serious evaluation of the impact of those courses on reducing remediation. The new four-year grant gave the collaborative team structure and a shared research agenda, engaging 12 institutions as early adopters. The research question was straightforward and to the point: Do students in the new treatment courses (pathway) have better outcomes than students in traditional developmental mathematics courses?

Representatives from the Statewide Mathematics Group created and adopted a shared set of course outcomes for the foundational developmental course to be inclusive of statistics concepts, as well as the shared adoption of the course outcomes for a general education, credit‐bearing statistics course.

Once the course outcomes were defined, faculty were supported through consultation with the experts at the Dana Center, and through a course development workshop to source and select course materials and consider innovative pedagogical methods for teaching statistics and foundational mathematics skills. In addition, funds from the FITW grant supported faculty in attending conferences and workshops to support their readiness to teach this new pathway. Faculty spent spring and summer 2016 developing their courses, and the first courses launched the week of August 29th as classes began for the Fall 2016 semester.

Primary and secondary cohorts of students enroll in the new developmental pathways across the twelve institutions. Their progress through developmental education, credit-bearing courses, and persistence and retention in college are the basis of the FITW MMRI evaluation study.

Building on decades of system-wide initiatives focused on mathematics reform, Maryland’s MMRI-FITW grant successfully created an effective alternative for non-STEM majors who enter college underprepared to succeed in the statistics courses required by their programs of study. Students who took the developmental treatment course passed at higher rates, in less time, and were more likely to enroll in credit-bearing coursework that satisfied requirements of their intended programs of study than did comparable students enrolled in the final algebra-based developmental course in a sequence. Furthermore, outcomes did not differ for part-time and non-traditional (age 24+) students, suggesting robust results across subgroups of students.