Revise, revise, revise

A critical piece to a major curriculum redesign is NOT to think you’ll get it all right on the first try. You MUST acknowledge that there will be need for revision. You must NOT throw out the baby with the bath water. There have been hiccups. But because we believe deeply in the original concept, we adjust rather than abandon.

We are using an assessment and research method called Action Research. There’s more to it than this, but the essence is that you take notes on how things go, then reflect back at the end of the semester and plan future revisions. This is not about quantitative data (though we collect that, too)–it’s about a qualitative assessment of how things are going.

And overall, they are going well. But as mentioned in a previous post, we ditched the 8-week half courses and dropped from 6 credit hours to 5. It has been a challenge to squish the class into one less credit hour, but at the same time this has forced us to revisit the priorities we had when designing the course. Some of those stray topics that work their way in don’t need to be there. In fact, they distract from the main ideas. Clarify your main goals, and stick to supporting them. You will have a better course in the end.

We’ve also decided to introduce a final exam into our Math Literacy courses. What? No final exam? Well, we had envisioned more of a portfolio-style final assessment at the end of the semester. And we do like that, so we’ve kept it. But in this instance, we have found that a more traditional final assessment might be warranted as well. The past couple of years we have finished each semester with a sense that students have not “pulled it all together” at the end. The last unit overwhelms them, and they don’t seem to end with a larger sense of the common threads running through the course. Our hope is that reviewing with their groups for a comprehensive final will help bring it all together, and provide a better assessment of what our students understand as they leave the course.

This is also our first semester with Math Literacy as a prerequisite to Intermediate Algebra. With Beginning Algebra gone, we wondered if we would see a difference in the student demographic. I really haven’t. There aren’t enough students at this level headed that way to make a huge difference in the class dynamic (for me, 2 in a class of 24), and I am seeing the same mix in ability that we see among all of our students. The bigger question will be next semester–do students coming out of Math Literacy perform the same in Intermediate Algebra as those who came out of Beginning Algebra? And in what ways does the Intermediate Algebra curriculum need to be adjusted because of the new prerequisite? I’ll keep you posted!