{"id":1603,"date":"2009-04-10T11:59:27","date_gmt":"2009-04-10T15:59:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1603"},"modified":"2009-04-10T11:59:27","modified_gmt":"2009-04-10T15:59:27","slug":"remedial-math-in-community-colleges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1603","title":{"rendered":"Remedial math in community colleges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The anonymous community-college <a href=\"http:\/\/suburbdad.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/death-march.html\">Dean Dad<\/a> wrote this morning about remedial math classes in community colleges, and I&#8217;ll use this as an <del>excuse<\/del> opportunity to bring together several thoughts I&#8217;ve spread around in different places or have not articulated:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Remedial education in community colleges <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/002876.html\">should be the logical place where we try Carol Twigg&#8217;s approach<\/a> to improving essential common instruction.<\/li>\n<li>We should stop blaming a mythical lack of alignment between high school and college for remedial-education needs in community colleges. I&#8217;d bet a bundle that every high school counselor tells students that algebra is required for college, and I&#8217;d bet a bundle that students who pass algebra and then are slotted for remedial education in community college <b>knew far more algebra at the end of the algebra course than when they took the placement test for CC<\/b>. My alternative hypothesis: students forget, especially if their hold on algebra in high school was by the fingernail. I&#8217;d be happy to be disproved wrong here, but someone has to do the research to keep stating the myth without my tossing tomatoes.<\/li>\n<li>There should be no conflict between the National Mathematics Advisory Panel&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ed.gov\/about\/bdscomm\/list\/mathpanel\/report\/final-report.pdf\">final report<\/a> recommendation emphasizing fractions as a central pre-algebra skill, on the one hand, and the desire to teach probability and statistics, on the other hand. How can you teach probability without students&#8217; understanding fractions?&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>My guess based on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.shermandorn.com\/mt\/archives\/001035.html\">observing weaknesses in communicating math-ed expectations<\/a> is that one key stumbling block in learning fractions and teaching them is grasping\/explaining how they can represent multiple properties and how the same properties of a fraction can be represented in different ways. If someone understands that 2 is a fraction, and that 67% not only is close to 2\/3 as an abstract value but also can represent an approximation of the same darned thing (for a whole load of values for &#8220;thing&#8221;), then the concept of rational numbers is a small step, or at least a much smaller step when someone responds to the first statement with &#8220;huh?&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The anonymous community-college Dean Dad wrote this morning about remedial math classes in community colleges, and I&#8217;ll use this as an excuse opportunity to bring together several thoughts I&#8217;ve spread around in different places or have not articulated: Remedial education in community colleges should be the logical place where we try Carol Twigg&#8217;s approach to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-higher-education"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-pR","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}