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| Photo: Emily Hanford |
"Algebra is a stumbling block for many freshmen. But do so many need to be in a remedial class?" reports Emily Hanford, senior education correspondent for APM Reports and producer of the audio documentary “Stuck at Square One: The Remedial Education Trap.”
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| Photo: New York Times |
Algebra
is clearly a stumbling block for many incoming college students. Nearly
60 percent of community college students end up in remedial math —
that’s more than double the number in remedial English. Four-year public
colleges are not far behind. According to government studies, 40
percent of their incoming students take at least one remedial class; 33
percent are in math.
One
explanation is obvious: limited academic preparation. Another is that
much of the community college population is older, and rusty at
factoring quadratics and finding inverse functions. Less obvious is that
students end up in remediation who don’t need to be there.
There’s evidence for this, most recently in an analysis
published in September by the National Center for Education Statistics.
To determine if students are ready for college-level work, colleges
often rely on one thing: the score on a test, be it the ACT, SAT or Accuplacer, the most common of the placement tools.
But
when the N.C.E.S. took a deeper look and considered two additional
factors — grade-point average and level of math taken in high school —
it found that 40 percent of “strongly prepared” students at public
two-year colleges and 13 percent at four-year institutions had taken
remedial math.
Further,
moderately or strongly prepared students were more likely to get a
bachelor’s degree if they skipped remediation altogether and went
straight to college-level classes.
Why?
Researchers aren’t sure, but they suspect that many students assigned
to remedial education, which costs money but doesn’t count for credit,
get frustrated and give up on college.
Source: New York Times
