Dive Brief:
- A handful of mathematicians and academic leaders have joined under the moniker Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics, or TPSEMath (pronounced “tipsy”), to create systemic change on campuses struggling with student outcomes in the discipline.
- Inside Higher Ed reports the group is encouraging a much more applied approach to math, the development of pathways for non-math majors to get them into courses that are relevant to their field, rather than ones that fulfill prerequisite or distribution requirements.
- Beyond the early courses, TPSEMath promotes partnerships with other departments to get math majors ready for careers outside of academia and give students in other disciplines a strong foundation in math to inform their own future work.
Dive Insight:
In the push to improve developmental education, math has gotten special attention. Placement tests that determine whether students are college-ready in math, disproportionately focus on their algebra skills. The Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin is among the organizations pushing differentiated math pathways that allow social science students to focus on statistics while students heading into hard science, engineering, or math fields are responsible for algebra and calculus.
Too many students place into remedial education for math and then drop out of college before even taking a credit-bearing course in the subject. Corequisite remediation has been extremely successful at getting students through gateway courses with additional academic supports alongside the credit-bearing course instruction.