PARAMUS, N.J. – Today’s lesson is how to add mixed numbers: 6 ²/₁₃ + 8 ⁷/₂₆. “Is anyone still having difficulty finding the least common denominator?” the instructor, Robert Fusco, asks. One student raises her hand and asks for help. “I’ve never seen this before,” she tells Mr. Fusco.

For many students, this is where community college begins – in a remedial arithmetic class, reviewing mathematics concepts they learned, or should have learned, before they graduated from high school.

“I get it quickly, and then I forget it completely,” says Ligia Halvorsen, 46, a student in Mr. Fusco’s class at Bergen Community College. “It’s like it was never explained to me.”

Ms. Halvorsen is determined to work through it. “Even though the material is for little kiddies, as some students in the class have said, I don’t care. I’m getting it,’’ she says.

Her upbeat attitude isn’t shared by thousands of students who enter community college unprepared for college-level work and find math a major stumbling block. As a result, remedial math is also where, for many of them, their community-college experience ends.

Nationally, about 60 percent of all community college students enroll in at least one remedial course in English or math, where they can get stuck studying elementary- and middle-school-level concepts.

 
Remedial math instructor Robert Fusco does basic division in front of a class. (Photo by Elizabeth Redden)

Only 31 percent of students placed into remedial math ever move beyond it, according to the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College, meaning the students never even get to college-level work, much less graduate.

The prospects are especially bleak for students who test into the lowest level of a remedial-math course sequence, where they’re asked to add, subtract, multiply, and divide whole numbers, fractions, mixed numbers and decimals.

Remedial math is the biggest obstacle to graduation at a time when President Obama wants community colleges to produce five million more graduates by 2020. Nationally, less than 25 percent of community-college students who take remedial – also known as developmental –courses earn a degree within eight years, and another 14 percent transfer to a four-year college without completing an associate degree or certificate.

By way of comparison, about 40 percent of community-college students who did not enroll in a remedial-education class complete a degree in eight years, and 14 percent transfer without the degree or certificate.

Poor graduation rates are one reason that community colleges nationwide – including Bergen –are rethinking their approach to developmental education, trying a wide variety of strategies to move students more quickly through remedial courses and on to college-level work.

http://hechingerreport.org/content/for-community-college-students-who-struggle-with-arithmetic-some-solutions_3047/