Reforming Math Pathways at California’s Community Colleges

The goal of developmental education (also known as remedial or basic skills education) is to help students acquire the skills they need to be successful in college courses, but its track record is poor. In fact, it is one of the largest impediments to student success in California’s community colleges. Many students do need additional work to be ready for college, particularly in math. But every year hundreds of thousands of students are deemed underprepared for college and placed into developmental courses from which relatively few emerge. Throughout the state, community colleges are revising assessment and placement procedures to ensure that students who are ready for college are not placed in developmental education. And, given the high failure rates in traditional developmental courses, colleges are also experimenting with alternative curricular approaches.

In this report, a follow-up to our earlier statistical portrait of developmental education, we analyze two new reforms in developmental math, known as statistics pathways and compressed math pathways. Both approaches aim to reduce the amount of time students spend in developmental math by reducing the amount of coursework and eliminating exit points—transitions where students are likely to leave the developmental sequence due to failure to reenroll in the next course in the sequence. Statistics pathways also aim to create an alternative non-algebra based sequence for students in majors that only require statistics (art, sociology, English, journalism, psychology, and
other liberal arts and humanities fields). The two approaches were compared to those for students in traditional developmental pathways.