The University of Texas as Austin’s Charles A. Dana Center recently profiled UCA’s co-requisite developmental math successes in their publication  (No. 4, 2018). In their article “Scaling Co-Requisite Supports at the 51��¥: Perspective from a Four-Year Higher Education Institution,” they describe the challenges, solutions, and results of the department’s co-requisite Foundations of College Algebra and Foundations of Quantitative Literacy. In particular, they highlighted the department’s success rates by ACT mathematics subscores. Students who earned a ACT subscore of 16, for example, had a 90% completion rate in Foundations of Quantitative Literacy and an 85% completion rate in Foundations of College Algebra.

According to the article, Dr. Kurt Boniecki, Associate Provost for Instructional Support, “understood that math faculty who had worked on the Progressive Math implementation were understandably disappointed by the decision to transition to full-scale, co-requisite math courses. Boniecki credits their willingness to make a data-driven decision because ‘math faculty…trust the numbers.” Overall, the article shared what worked for the math faculty and their students and how the department has adopted the co-requisite model over the past few years so that more students are served.

“We also piloted corequisite College Algebra in 2015. We had several different versions of algebra at that time, from a standalone intermediate algebra to an eight-week accelerated course, but we immediately realized that the corequisite model was outperforming the others. It only took us one semester to say, ‘this is far better than what we’re doing.’… In the corequisite algebra course, we are averaging an 85 percent success rate. Last fall, we had a 92 percent pass rate. Successful completion of the transitional writing course is at about 80 percent.”

Dr. Amy Baldwin, Ed.D
Chair, Department of Student Transitions
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