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RE: Reading and math
Posted:
Jun 19, 2009 6:58 AM
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After much arguing and hard work, 3 years ago St. Louis Community College passed a reading requirement. Before enrolling in any 100 level class, students must complete the developmental reading sequence or place out of it. Any department that feels their courses should be exempt from this requirement may go through our curriculum revision process to have a "no reading requirement" note put on any courses in their area. Surprisingly enough, I'd bet there are only about 8 such courses (keyboarding, and public speaking come to mind.... all courses in art, PE, music etc. have a reading requirment).
Two comments about all of this: First, we actually passed a basic skills requirement ("Before enrolling in any 100 level class, students must complete all develomental work or place out of it - English, Reading, Math), but the administration seems to be scared to put the English and Math portions of it in place.
Second, and I'm sure all of you reading this have seen this coming: Our Intermediate Algebra students (and above) do much better now, and we can really count on their having good reading skills), but, of course, our developmental math students still can't read....so it hasn't made much difference there....those of us who unofficially advise students recommend that they put off their developmental math courses until they've finished their reading courses....
Lillian Seese
Mathematics Professor
COL.020 Coordinator
St. Louis Community College at Meramec
11333 Big Bend Blvd. Kirkwood MO 63122
314-984-7773
________________________________
From: owner-mathedcc@mathforum.org on behalf of broomell@optonline.net
Sent: Thu 6/18/2009 8:59 PM
To: Laura Bracken
Cc: mathedcc@mathforum.org
Subject: Re: Reading and math
Our school required reading remediation for full-time students. However, there is no reading requirement for any courses. As a result, a student can need remediation in English, reading, but not math. The courses that are recommended are liberal arts courses, including statistics, and all of these require reading along with math. In our case, it is not the lack of remediation in reading that is the problem, but rather the lack of reading pre-requisites for math courses. There should be a reading across the curriculum movement!
Bev Broomell
Suffolk County Community College
Selden, NY 11784
----- Original Message -----
From: Laura Bracken
Date: Thursday, June 18, 2009 11:31 am
Subject: Reading and math
To: mathedcc@mathforum.org
> One of the challenges I face is teaching students who have very
> low reading levels. Sometimes it is because English is not
> their native language but more often at my school, it is just
> that they never learned to read very well.
>
> I suspect some of these students are learning disabled
> (although many students enter college and want to leave that
> diagnosis behind them.) But, even if they have accommodation,
> the best they are going to get is a reader. That doesn't help
> them when they don't know the vocabulary.
>
> These students can often learn algorithms but problem solving is
> a real challenge. At our college, passing a core-level math
> class (not pre-calc) means a lot of problem solving and reading.
> That means that we include a lot of problem solving in our
> developmental curriculum.
>
> Any ideas of what to do to help these students? Reading
> competency and remediation is not required by our state, just
> writing and mathematics. So, I can't require them to take a
> reading class.
>
> Laura
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