Case Studies
University of Wisconsin - Stout
The University of Wisconsin–Stout was founded in 1891 and serves roughly 8,000 students from its Menomonie, Wisconsin, campus. Most students live on campus and follow the national trend: 5 to 10 percent of a typical incoming class of 1,500–1,700 first-year students place into Math 010, a remedial algebra course, and another 35 percent place into Math 110, an intermediate algebra course and prerequisite to courses satisfying the university’s general math requirement. Over the eight semesters prior to fall 2004, failure/withdrawal rates in these courses averaged a combined 29 percent (beginning algebra) and 29.2 percent (intermediate algebra).
Because studies indicate that success in first-year math courses is a strong predictor of retention into the second year of college, UW-Stout had strong incentive to invest resources in a program designed to decrease its failure/withdrawal rates. “If we can get kids through math, they’ll stay in school and stay at UW-Stout,” says Dr. Jeanne Foley, director of UW-Stout’s Math Teaching and Learning Center (Math TLC). The Math TLC was created via a special allocation by the chancellor’s office in fall 2004 to develop a comprehensive approach combining online work with required daily classroom sessions and a new tutoring service devoted specifically to introductory algebra courses. During the past two and a half years, the center has served more than 1,600 students and achieved a 62 percent reduction in failure/ withdrawal rates in beginning algebra, and a 32 percent reduction in intermediate algebra.
Prior to 2004, beginning algebra and intermediate algebra were taught in the traditional style by using classroom lectures, daily take-home problem sets, and paper tests and quizzes. A departmental task force identified students’ failure to regularly complete homework assignments as the primary cause of the low success rates in these two courses. Students’ poor attendance at class sessions and limited use of office hours and free tutoring services were also cited as major obstacles to success. To remedy the problem, the mathematics department (1) capitalized on UW-Stout’s E-Scholar initiative— which has provided laptop computers, all-campus wireless Internet access, and comprehensive integration of technology across curricula for all incoming students since fall 2002—and (2) implemented MyMathLab as a cornerstone of Math TLC. Every day, MML automatically grades homework that counts significantly (about 25 percent) toward the course grade. MML’s Gradebook and reporting features also enable instructors to monitor student progress and actively intervene the moment a student shows signs of trouble. “This keeps students from falling behind,” says Foley. “We know on a daily basis what is happening and can get them help immediately.”
MML also helped the faculty at UW-Stout standardize their classes. Each class within a course has the same syllabus, homework assignments, tests, and quizzes; offers the same content; and enforces the same grading standard and level of passing. “This has promoted collaboration among the instructors, which has been a very good thing,” says Foley. “More collaboration and more communication bring our talents together, maximize the talent pool of teachers, and ensure that every student is going to learn and be taught the same objectives at the same high level of quality.”
Classes are hybrids of online homework and tests and required daily classroom sessions in a technology-enhanced classroom/tutor lab complex, and section sizes are small so as to facilitate personal interaction among students, instructors, and tutors. Another integral component of the program is a tutoring service dedicated exclusively to supporting students in these two courses and in which teaching staff are actively positioned as partners in learning and advocates for success. Foley creates special MyMathLab review and training courses with weekly assignments for her undergraduate peer tutors to prepare them to answer both content and software questions that the students taking the two courses are likely to have. This approach has required committing more resources to lower-level courses than is typical, but evidence shows that the investment is paying off in improved student success—and is thus likely to improve retention rates.
The Math TLC program has served 1,603 students since fall 2004. The combined failure/withdrawal rate for Math 010 students under the new system has plummeted 62 percent—from an average of 29 percent over the four years prior to the advent of the Math TLC program— to an average of 11 percent since that inception.
Results for Math 110 showed a less dramatic but still significant, 32 percent reduction in failure/withdrawal rates: from 29.2 percent to 19.8 percent. Note that the improvement was achieved despite elevated passing standards; the minimum changed to requiring a grade of at least C (versus D) to pass the class. In addition, the amount of required homework was increased, and the testing and grading standards made more rigorous.
The administration at UW-Stout wasn’t initially targeting any specific student population, “but as time passed, I noticed that the students who were benefiting the most from the new approach were the nontraditional and minority students,” says Foley. “Minority students generally make up a relatively small portion—about 6 to 7 percent—of our student population, and increasing the diversity of our student body is a priority goal. Before the new program started, the minority student subgroup was failing these two introductory math classes at a rate even higher than that for the general student population.
Now we’re finding that the percentage gap between minority and nonminority students has been cut by more than half.” Reduction in math failure/withdrawal rates among nontraditional and minority students is the biggest thing universities can do toward keeping these students in school in general. Its implications reach far beyond the individual student. “The impact of those who can finally get a degree and get ahead financially is huge,” says Foley. “They become role models for others.”
UW-Stout’s faculty credits the success of the program to three key factors.
- MyMathLab provides immediate feedback, allows multiple attempts, and offers several sources of online help for each assigned problem. The online grading system means that instructors can require daily homework assignments. And instructors can continually monitor students’ progress on the daily work and weekly tests and intervene promptly with extra assistance and study strategies as needed.
- Attendance is required at sections with the students’ own teacher. These daily sessions consist of a brief lecture on the day’s topic followed by in-class time to begin MML homework with assistance from the teacher and an undergraduate tutor. (Students are given the option of earning the right to sign an individual contract for independent work if standards of 100 percent on all homework and at least 90 percent on all tests and quizzes are maintained. Instructors report, however, that less than half of the students who qualify for independent status exercise their privilege to skip class.) The program thus gives intensive hands-on help to those who need it most while at the same time allowing better-prepared students to work ahead and even finish the course early while still having help available when needed.
- All sections are taught in a single, dedicated, technology-enhanced classroom that is adjacent to the third key feature of the program: a tutor lab staffed 44 hours a week by the course instructors and by trained undergraduate peer tutors.
Through the use of MML’s tracking features, instructors have seen that 95 percent of students are submitting all homework assignments, with an average score of 92 percent. Students are spending an average of 95 minutes on each day’s homework assignment—a figure for which no previous comparison data exist but that most teachers of remedial and prerequisite math courses anywhere would find astonishing. Attendance rates now average 94 percent for Math 110, and 85 percent for Math 010. And the tutor lab logs 150–200 student visits per week.
In addition to passing these two courses at unprecedented rates, students are also registering greater engagement and satisfaction with the learning experience—despite the greater demands placed on them. On an anonymous and voluntary survey distributed to Math TLC students at the end of each semester, 91 percent of respondents indicated they had learned as much as or more than they expected to learn coming into the course; 96 percent said they’d be likely to again take a course using this structure; and a majority—55 percent—said they liked the class more than they expected to like it.
Of particular interest is that despite the prominence of online homework and learning tools, students still rated “my teacher” as the top factor influencing their learning (out of seven choices: online homework, online help, lectures, tutors, my teacher, open lab, textbook). Says Foley, “MML frees teachers from routine grading and affords them more time to talk with the students.”
UW-Stout’s successes haven’t gone unnoticed. The U.S. Department of Education recently awarded the Math TLC a three-year, $450,000 grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, citing the 61 percent reduction in failure/withdrawal rates in beginning algebra and 23 percent in intermediate algebra achieved by this new approach during its first two years of operation. UW-Stout officials plan to (1) use the grant to assess whether the Math TLC experience encourages more students to pursue courses in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; (2) expand the program to higher-level math courses and to a summer precollege preparatory program for incoming atrisk students; and (3) provide workshops to teach other universities within the UW System how to adapt the program on their campuses.
If the Math TLC program is any indication of the rest of the school, UW-Stout is surely living up to its tagline: The School of Choice for the 21st Century.
