Full implementation of AB705 begins in Fall 2019 in California. At my school (College of the Sequoias) developmental math courses like prealgebra and elementary/intermediate algebra will no longer be offered. Students will begin in a transfer-level class: intro statistics, college algebra, or math for teachers. Some, depending on their high school GPA, will also take a 1 or 2 unit corequisite support class. The support class is supposed to cover prerequisite topics on a “just in time” basis.

What I am most concerned about is not the math skills that need to be covered, although that is an issue. I am most concerned with the fact that students are missing between 1 and 3 classes where they learn how to be a math student.

Mindsets

We are incorporating student skills into all of our support courses, starting with mindsets. Our thought is that many students will benefit from developing a growth mindset and believing that they can learn this transfer-level material without working their way up our old sequence of courses. This will also help students to shift their focus from trying to memorize and mimic procedures to thinking about concepts and being creative.

We are going to use a mixture of some of the following strategies:

• Writing prompts that will lead to class discussions about overcoming adversity in other areas and how the same approaches can be used to learn mathematics.
• Videos (Carol Dweck’s TED talk, Jo Boaler’s TED talk, Dave Paunesku’s YouTube videos, Train Ugly videos, …) that will be watched outside of class and lead to classroom discussions or written reflections.
• Dave Paunesku has also made a series of 4 videos that are available inside newer Pearson MyLab courses along with short assessments.
• Carol Dweck’s mindset assessment tool that is available online so students become aware of their mindset.
• Jo Boaler’s 6-week online class on mathematical mindsets.
• Student projects on the growth mindset.

We may also invite counselors and learning specialists on campus to come share their mindset thoughts and experience.

Other Student Skills

I’ll begin the list with reading comprehension. One area where students used to benefit from developmental math was through there exposure to all of the various application problems. Especially in statistics, students need to be able to read through a problem, determine the appropriate strategy to use, and extract the correct information from the problem. I had a brief discussion with a North Carolina instructor who had developed a series of materials that focused on this skill. We plan to use a similar, “just in time” approach for reading comprehension. In statistics, for example, this would be appropriate when covering standard deviation (sample versus population), probability, probability distributions (binomial/Poisson/normal), and inferential (confidence intervals versus hypothesis tests, proportions versus means, …).

Next up: time management. Time management is a crucial skill for students, and our students will not have the experience of balancing the time required to learn mathematics with the time required to do all of the other things our busy students do. We will have students create their ideal weekly calendars, actually keep track of what they did, and evaluate how well they managed their time. We will have class discussions of what sort of time commitment their classes should take up, as well as ways to free up more time for school work. I’d also like to incorporate some ideas I have incorporated from David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Leo Babauta’s Zen To Done.

Other skills we feel are important:

• Note taking
• Test preparation
• Test taking
• Retrieval practice
• Working in groups
• Doing homework effectively
• Getting the most out of your materials

One colleague mentioned a series of Crash Course videos on YouTube that covers some of these ideas. I watched one of their videos on note taking and thought it was quite good.

Conclusion

In our old sequence of courses we understood that students needed to learn how to become a better math student. Placing students directly into transfer-level math is not going to change this problem. Instead, we have to make dedicated efforts to help our students develop their student skills in a quicker fashion. Assuming that all students who show up in our classes already possess the student skills necessary for success is dangerous. The payoff could be huge, helping these students develop skills that will help them in their future classes as well as in their post-college lives.

Feedback

How do you feel about incorporating mindsets and student skills into your classes? Are there skills I have left out? Other resources you’d recommend? I’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment, reach out to me on Twitter, or send me an email through the contact page on my website.

 

I’m putting together a series of blogs on the challenges of AB705 and how that affects instructors and students, as well as its impact on introductory statistics. I’d appreciate any comments or feedback, as well as any questions you may have or ideas for upcoming blogs.  – George