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Abstract Developmental education (dev-ed) aims to help students acquire knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college-level coursework. The traditional prerequisite approach to postsecondary dev-ed—where students take remedial courses that do not count toward a credential—appears to stymie progress toward a degree. At community colleges across the country, most students require remediation in math, creating a barrier to college-level credits under the traditional approach. Corequisite coursework is a structural reform that places students directly into a college-level course in the same term they receive dev-ed support. Using administrative data from Texas community colleges and a regression discontinuity design, we examine whether corequisite math improves student success compared with traditional prerequisite dev-ed. We find that corequisite math quickly improves student completion of math requirements without any obvious drawbacks, but students in corequisite math were not substantially closer to degree completion than their peers in traditional dev-ed after 3 years.
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A Computer Scientist Teaches Gen Ed Math
A nationwide effort is underway to provide students pursuing higher education with options for satisfying general education (gen ed) math requirements. Within the context of this effort, computer science has an opportunity to introduce students to programming fundamentals and computer science principles while also satisfying gen ed math requirements. This paper is an experience report that describes initial efforts at the University of Nebraska-Omaha in piloting a course, satisfying the gen ed math requirements for non-STEM majors, whose content spans computer science, mathematics as well as the visual arts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1712080
- PAR ID:
- 10322754
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/CSCI49370.2019.00151
