Leslie Gomes, Lecturer II in the Department of Student Transitions, works with her student in a co-requisite course.
The good work in the Department of Student Transitions has gained national attention. After years of offering stand-alone developmental math courses and after a few years of offering modular-based Progressive Mathematics, the Department of Student Transitions began the process of piloting, refining, and expanding co-requisite courses that pair a transitional math class with a college-level math class. The results have been a stunning success.
The University of Texas as Austin’s Charles A. Dana Center recently profiled UCA’s co-requisite developmental math successes in their publication Notes from the Field (No. 4, 2018). In their article “Scaling Co-Requisite Supports at the University of Central Arkansas: Perspective from a Four-Year Higher Education Institution,” they describe the challenges, solutions, and results of the department’s co-requisite Foundations of College Algebra and Foundations of Quantitative Literacy. In particular, they highlighted the department’s success rates by ACT mathematics subscores. Students who earned a ACT subscore of 16, for example, had a 90% completion rate in Foundations of Quantitative Literacy and an 85% completion rate in Foundations of College Algebra.
According to the article, Dr. Kurt Boniecki, Associate Provost for Instructional Support, “understood that math faculty who had worked on the Progressive Math implementation were understandably disappointed by the decision to transition to full-scale, co-requisite math courses. Boniecki credits their willingness to make a data-driven decision because ‘math faculty…trust the numbers.” Overall, the article shared what worked for the math faculty and their students and how the department has adapted the co-requisite model over the past few years so that more students are served.
The Dana Center highlighted UCA’s co-requisite developmental math program in its most recent publication.