Here I want to explain what the big push was that caused us to do all of this.
Reason for the change:
The State legislature for Texas passed and then the governor
signed into law House Bill 2223 during the the session that ended in Early
2017. See this PDF for a lot of details:
History of HB 2223 here http://www.thecb.state.tx.us/reports/PDF/10716.PDF
HB 2223 was signed into law June 2017, to start going into
effect fall of 2018, with full implementation by fall of 2020. The stages are detailed in point 4 of the
linked document. But course registration
for fall 2018 for us was due by around March 1 of 2018, so we had about eight
months from when all the details were known until we had to have the system in
place. (The Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board – THECB or “co-board” had to read the law and then decide on
some of the measures after the law went into effect, hence the only eight
months.)
Also, any developmental course that required passing before
the student could enroll in the credit level class would NOT count, so we had
to change the current developmental mathematics model. (see point 10 in the linked document for
details) Registration for Fall 2017 was
already well underway, so there was also really no way to try and implement a
pilot, get any feedback, and then set that up for registration going forward.
All of this meant we were under a severe time crunch to set
up a system that would work, fit our system, and expand to cover at least 75%
of our students who needed developmental mathematics by 2020. This meant that we had to have a system to
cover all of our pathways and classes, and would fit all of the other things
that were detailed in the previous post.
Furthermore, whatever we set up would have to easily fit within our
current systems for advising, registration, student tracking, etc. Plus, we really didn’t know of any way to
randomly pick some students to take extra mathematics classes while their
friends would not have to. In the end,
the easiest way to meet all of these demands was to have what we call paired
classes for ALL students who would have gone into developmental
mathematics.
More on this in the next post.
We ended up settling on a two tiered system. An emporium lab type course for those
students who would need basic arithmetic and basic algebra material (what you
likely know as basic and introductory algebra) and a support class for those
who would have placed into what is usually called intermediate algebra. The next post will detail the hows and whys
of this system.
As always, if you have questions, comments, etc, let me
know.
Twitter: @robebymathdude
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