Pacific Crest Developmental Math Curriculum Institute

Baker College

September 11, 2002

Participants

Section 1: Overview of Curriculum Change Process – Three Year Project

Project’s Targeted Outcomes

Section 2:Issues Inhibiting Project Success

Section 3: Step 1: Identifying Long-term Behaviors

Section 4Step 2: Course Intentions

Section 5:Step 3: Writing Measurable Learning Outcomes

Section 6: Discoveries for the First Day

Section 7: Step 4: Constructing the Knowledge Table for Basic Math

Knowledge Table for Basic Math Course

Just in time lecture: Assessment vs Evaluation see Tab 12

Step 5 - Choosing themes for the course

Section 8: Self-assessment of current practice with Basic Math

Section 9: Step 6 - Creating a methodology

Converting a mixed number or fraction to a percent

Section 10: Step 7: Writing the Performance Criteria

Step 8: Identify a set of activities

Section 11:Excitement vs Anxiety Chart

Section 12: Step 9 - Inventorying Appropriate Learning Skills

Section 12: Discussion of steps 10 - 15

Step 10: Build key performance measures

Step 11: Identify activity preference types

Step 12: Match activity types with chosen activities

Step 13: Allocate time across themes

Step 14: Choose the top 30 in-class and 30 out-of-class activities

Step 15: Sequence the activities across the term

Section 13: Step 16 - Modeling Creating an Activity

Step 17: Enhancing activities using technology

Section 14: Assessment of Foundations of Prealgebra and selected activity

Step 18: Have the activities you create peer reviewed.

Assessment of Foundations of Prealgebra

Assessment of the Foundations of Prealgebra Activity 3.5

Section 15: Assessment and Evaluation

Step 19: Design the course assessment system

Step 20 Design a course evaluation system

Step 21 Create the syllabus

Discussion of the three year program

Vocabulary Development

Participants

Ross / Lori / Math/Sci / Baker-Jackson / W 517.841.4503
H 517.764.0983 /
VanGieson / Cindy / CAD-admin / Baker-Jackson / W 517.780.4554
H 517.783.5639 /
Fremeau / Joyce / Math / Baker-Jackson / W 517.
H 517.783.3979 /
Hill / Nancy / Dean-Gen Ed / Baker-Jackson / W 517.789.6123x4569
H 517.787.3950 /
Wild / Rosalie / Math / Baker-Clinton / W 517.
H 586.293.7982 /
Dirjan / Rose / Math / Baker-Clinton / W 586.791.6610
H 586.268.7997 /
DuChene / Ron / Math / Baker-Clinton / W 586.791.6610
H 519.542.6927 /
Gerich / Ron / Math / Baker-Auburn Hills / W 248.340.0600
H 586.323.9933 /
Davis / Chris / Admin / Baker-Flint
Karsten / Tina / Math / Baker-Auburn Hills / W 248.340.0600
H 248.377.4423 /
Reseigh / Anna / Math / Baker Auburn Hills / W 248.340.0600
H 248.652.1418 /
Schram / Chris / Teacher prep / Baker-Flint / W 810.766.4379
H 517.694.2831 /
Honhart / Barbara / Admin / Baker-Flint / W 810.766.4303
H 517.675.7694 /
Kaufman / Patty / Admin / Baker-Flint / W 586.790.9590
H 248.652.9783 /
Sovis / Sheri / Inst Design / Baker-Flint / W
H 810.638.5250 /
Bordine / Ronnie / Admin / Baker-Flint / W 810.766.4107
Gonzalez / Sharleen / Math / Baker-Flint / W 810.766.4384
H 810.636.2431 /
Lutz / Kim / Curriculum / Baker-Flint / W 810.766.4271
H 810.687.7468 /
Atnip / Carol / Consultant / Pacific Crest / W/H 812.944.9149 /
Apple / Dan / Consultant / Pacific Crest / 1.800.421.9826 /

Section 1: Overview of Curriculum Change Process – Three Year Project

After introductions and welcomes by Barbara Honhart and Chris Davis, Dan offered the following two challenging outcomes for Baker College over the next three years.

  1. Cut attrition rate of the “Basic Math” course in half within 3 years of the pilot course by using advanced practice, resource materials, and experiences from assessments of other institutions.
  2. Ensure that student preparation from the pilot courses is strong enough to cut the normal attrition rate in the next course by half.

Project’s Targeted Outcomes

By spring 2005:

  1. Students in the pilot attrition rate cut in half
  2. Students attrition in the next math course attrition rate are cut in half

Questions to be considering are: In three years, as a system, how are you going to cut the attrition in half? Can the pre-algebra course be eliminated? What are the barriers to success of the 2 outcomes above? What are barriers to accountability for reaching the goal?

Event outcomes

  1. Produce a course design process that clearly articulates long-term behaviors and measurable learning outcomes.
  2. Learn how to design activities
  3. Understand how to incorporate assessment better into the course.
  4. Facilitate shifting of the ownership of innovations to the faculty.
  5. Build a team on each campus.
  6. Do a Need analysis - what are the needs?
  7. Review and assess available resources.
  8. Produce a plan of action for the 3 years.
  9. Get collective commitment/buy-in.

Issues to resolve

  1. How to build students confidence in learning math.
  1. How to integrate assessment at all levels.
  2. How to build better facilitation skills.

Available from Pacific Crest are the following critical institutes that the faculty can attend for useful and practical application in the classroom: Teaching Institute, Curriculum Design, Learning to Learn Camp, Student Success Institute, Assessment Institute, Facilitator’s Institute, Interactive Learning Institute. Dan then gave the overview of Process Education and explained how the philosophy supports shifting the focus from “teaching” to facilitating learning in the classroom environment.

Participants were directed to the Curriculum Design Notebook for the list of Goals for the event. Groups were asked to read the Overview and Steps in Designing a Course and to collaborate on beginning the first step: identifying key long-term behaviors.

Questions on steps:

Does the assessment system have to rely on tests? Does the grading system have to include tests? Are we grading effectively to measure the outcomes? How do we design a grading system to effectively measure the learning outcomes? What does the course assessment system include? How is assessment imbedded?

What is the difference between long-term behavior and learning outcome? Long-term behavior is attitude and ability taken with students as they leave the course (what will they look like two yrs down the road?); learning outcomes is a set of knowledge and process skills to be developedby the end of the course.

Section 2:Issues Inhibiting Project Success

Activity:Brainstorm key issues that will need to be addressed to meet the 2 goals outlined above.

  1. Having clear expectations of prerequisite skills (both knowledge and process skills) with reliable measures of those skills and strong placement procedures to put them in courses with strong likelihood for success.
  1. A General Set of Attitudes that students bring in that include:
  2. Low persistence – quick to give up
  3. Been there/did that – already know it
  4. Don’t care
  5. Work habits don’t match need in order to be successful
  6. Great deal of fear
  1. Limited nature of different teaching/learning techniques among the practitioners and a leaning towards more passive vs. active techniques.
  1. How to build a team of Basic Math Instructors – due to the part-time nature, spread of campuses, etc. – how to build a community of educators who buy into the project
  1. How to roll out the team to the system – faculty development, share ownership, etc
  1. Lack of educational expertise of faculty – background in teaching and learning
  1. Low valuing of the basic math course as critical to success to Baker College at each campus – assignment of load, recruitment of instructors
  1. 10-week term – shortness and liability to meet a set of outcomes in a short cycle.
  1. Poor learning behavior – students do not have strong learning process, learning skills, and have not learned how to be an effective learner
  1. Socio/economic issues; magnitude of life crises – lack of support and life vision
  1. Personal support system is a barrier – how to evolve your own personal system of support
  1. Attendance pattern of students (take a head count of attendees at week 4 for baseline)
  1. Communication/language skills of articulating mathematics – learn to use an abstract system of symbols
  1. Self-assessment and validation skills are weak
  1. Students’ learning process skill levels are unique; identify skill set for the course and develop those skills in the students: use the content of the course to grow the skill set of the student
  1. Students don’t value their learning experience (math) and the outcome of that learning; why learn something; what relevance does it have. One solution is the Life Vision Portfolio
  1. Institutional Barriers:
  1. support of learning support
  2. skepticism
  3. change and support in different educational processes
  4. placement of students (assessment/placement issues)
  5. current level of institutional research
  6. class size (classrooms available, instructors available, etc.)
  7. current policies on admitting and retaining students
  8. conditional admits
  9. continuity of students finishing course with another instructor/lab/tutor
  1. Mentoring system for faculty who come into this program in the future
  1. Diversity in knowledge and process skills of students
  1. Bringing support services into the team
  1. Strength of the grading system in measuring learning outcomes
  1. $$$$ - building a cost effective model that rewards performance of faculty who achieve increased levels of performance
  1. Quality of materials and instruction – make sure there is a set of resources available for instructors
  1. Resistance to change – status quo is ok
  1. Mathematical maturity of the students

Section 3: Step 1: Identifying Long-term Behaviors

Group tasks were to:

  1. Identify 3 to 5 long-term behaviors from the perspective of a business math or algebra instructor.
  1. Perspective of an academic program head: What do they wish students’ long-term behaviors from the basic math course to be when coming into their academic program?

Long-term Behaviors

  1. Easily translates mathematical dialogue into exact mathematical representations so that they can explore, play with, and evolve mathematical understanding and meaning
  2. Consistently demonstrates a self-directed approach to practice by assessing current performance against the course’s performance criteria to determine what current effort needs to be done to meet the expectations
  3. Consistently documents their process of problem solving in a discipline and structure that values neatness and clarity of thinking in every significant problem solving challenge.
  4. Confident in tackling new mathematical learning with enthusiasm and enjoyment for the power it will bring.
  5. Aggressively links prior knowledge to new learning situations to reconcile inconsistencies in mental models to advance integrated mathematical understanding
  6. Consistently chooses appropriate mathematical concepts, models and processes to given real-world situations to provide strong solutions and effective reasoning to mathematically related challenges.

Section 4Step 2: Course Intentions

  1. To build competency (at a mastery level) in mental math computation skills independent of calculators and computers during their first two terms
  2. To ensure future success in subsequent math and math-related courses
  3. Increase confidence in mathematical ability
  4. To alleviate any past math anxiety that has built up to allow them to obtain a fresh start
  5. To strengthen their learning process of mathematics to incorporate more best practices in how they go about their learning
  6. To have students to be more open to the necessary changes in their rote practices that may be illogical and inconsistent, but their belief is so strong that they can’t move forward.
  7. To advance problem solving process especially in the context of story problems
  8. To better use a set of validation tools (including estimation)

Section 5:Step 3: Writing Measurable Learning Outcomes

There are five types of Learning Outcomes:

  1. Competency – what can someone do at what level of performance
  • Explicit
  • Descriptive
  • At least level three on Bloom’s Taxonomy
  • Action oriented
  • Measurable
  1. Movement/Growth – how much progress in a transferable skill/process – such problem solving
  • Precise
  • Descriptive
  • Areas of movement
  • Attitudes incorporated
  • Delta growth expected
  1. Accomplishment – production of something that is meaningful and significant to an outside audience
  • Externally validated
  • Significant personal meaning
  • Beyond the normal
  • Product/result oriented
  • Strong ownership of result
  1. Experience
  • Unique
  • Descriptive
  • Shared
  • Reflective
  • Emotional
  1. Integrated Performance
  • Multiple dimensions
  • Holistic
  • Professionally oriented
  • Explicit
  • Builds on past and current learning outcomes

Competencies

  1. Can write a systematic and sequential set of steps that documents the problem solving process used.
  2. Can effectively use various notation and application of negative numerical models in common practice and articulate their meaning.
  3. Can accurately evaluate an expression

Movement/Growth

  1. Increases ability to learn mathematics and effectively teaching this knowledge to others
  2. A more active learner with stronger ownership and control of their learning process
  3. Advance the performance in interpreting, setting up, performing, documenting, and validating story problems

Experience

  1. Successfully be the mathematical expert and consultant to help others be successful in learning and applying mathematics
  2. Successfully use the supporting resources of Baker College for mathematical learning

Integrated Performance

  1. A comprehensive exploration of the effective use of mathematical reasoning and problem solving in a real-life experience (professional or personal) that increased the quality of outcome based upon the following:

-strong problem solving process that is well documented and validated

-the effective use of mathematical models and concepts during the project development

-clear and effective communication in language and symbols to effectively connect to the intended audience

-made use of new mathematical ideas outside of what was presented or covered in the course syllabus

-incorporate a project report of self-assessment to discuss the strengths and areas to improve in their performance with learning, applying, and teaching of mathematical concepts and principles

-to make effective use of the abundant available resources (such as design institutional resources as well as external to institution) to support their exploration and research

Section 6: Discoveries for the First Day

  1. Whole new way to approach Basic Math than previously visioned. Summarize a list of these characteristics.
  2. The possible or probable resistant to change from current fundamental practices. There is a common understood way of teaching fundamental math courses – a deviation that is significant is hard for a culture to make.
  3. Before there is significant change in content, it is important to make behavioral changes with respect to your self-actualization (learner).
  4. New teaching techniques – such as fractions – get real-life applications from the internet – finding the need prior to the exploration - create learning need prior to the learning
  5. The resistance of working with the extended team and how to go about significant change is important. Since the majority (> 95%) are part-time and have other significant obligations – must tap into how to value this opportunity.
  6. The correlation between the college success strategies and the basic math are significant – paired linked courses between the two.
  7. The importance to inventory the clients’ needs and then determine what the greatest intersection of content and define what will be in and not be in and then redirect back to the programs what should be discipline specific.

Section 7: Step 4: Constructing the Knowledge Table for Basic Math

Brainstorm: What are all the things you want students to know coming in to algebra or business math:

  1. Long Division (P)
  2. Estimation (Skill)
  3. Order of Operations (p)
  4. Round numbers (P)
  5. Use of Negative numbers in Computation (context)
  6. Subtracting whole numbers (p)
  7. Adding whole numbers (p)
  8. Sets of numbers (tool)
  9. Concept of a fraction (c)
  10. Add & subtract fractions of like fractions (p)
  11. Add & subtract fraction unlike fractions (P)
  12. Multiply fractions - P
  13. Multiplying whole numbers - P
  14. Divide fractions - P
  15. Properties of 1 & 0 - C
  16. Add & subtract decimals - P
  17. Multiply decimals - P
  18. Divide decimals - P
  19. Order numbers – Number Line – (C)
  20. Sorting numbers - P
  21. Neatness - WOB
  22. Translating English language to symbolic - contextual
  23. Converting decimals to fractions to percents - P
  24. Pattern recognition (skill)
  25. Solve a proportion - P
  26. Percents - C
  27. Exponents - C
  28. Variables -C
  29. Solving for a variable - P
  30. Geometric areas - C
  31. Place values – C
  32. Substitution - P
  33. rates vs. ratios - Contextual
  34. Problem Solving - P
  35. Unit rate - P
  36. Calculator - T
  37. Fact tables - T
  38. Taking risks (skill)
  39. Self-assessment - WOB
  40. Effectively using resources (skill)

1

Learning Skills

  • Estimation (Skill)
  • Effectively using resources (skill)
  • Pattern recognition (skill)
  • Taking risks (skill)

Concepts

  • Concept of a fraction/mixed numbers (c)
  • Properties of 1 & 0 - C
  • Order numbers – Number Line – (C)
  • Percents - C
  • Exponents - C
  • Variables -C
  • Geometric areas - C
  • Place values – C

Processes

  • Long Division (P)
  • Order of Operations (p)
  • Round numbers (P)
  • Add & subtract fractions OF like fractions (p)
  • Add & subtract fraction unlike fractions (P)
  • Multiply fractions - P
  • Multiplying whole numbers - P
  • Divide fractions - P
  • Subtracting whole numbers (p)
  • Adding whole numbers (p)
  • Add & subtract decimals - P
  • Multiply decimals - P
  • Divide decimals - P
  • Converting decimals to fractions to percents - P
  • Sorting numbers - P
  • Solve a proportion - P
  • Solving for a variable - P
  • Substitution - P
  • Reducing fractions - P
  • Problem Solving - P
  • Unit rate – P
  • Converting mixed numbers to improper fractions - P

Tools

  • Sets of numbers (tool)
  • Calculator - T
  • Fact tables - T

Contextual Knowledge

  • Use of Negative numbers in Computation (context)
  • Translating English language to symbolic - contextual
  • rates vs. ratios – Contextual

Way of Being

  • Neatness - WOB
  • Self-assessment - WOB

Knowledge Table for Basic Math Course

Concepts / Processes / Tools / Contextual / Ways of Being / Skills
Concept of a fraction/mixed numbers / Long Division / Sets of numbers / Use of Negative numbers in Computation / Neatness / Estimation
Properties of 1 & 0 / Order of Operations / Calculator / Translating English language to symbolic / Self-assessment / Effectively using resources
Order numbers – Number Line / Round numbers / Fact tables / rates vs. ratios / Pattern recognition
Percents / Add & subtract fractions OF like fractions / Taking risks
Exponents / Add & subtract fraction unlike fractions
Variables / Multiply fractions
Geometric areas / Multiplying whole numbers
Place values / Divide fractions
Subtracting whole numbers
Adding whole numbers
Add & subtract decimals
Multiply decimals
Divide decimals
Converting decimals to fractions to percents
Sorting numbers
Solve a proportion
Solving for a variable
Substitution
Reducing fractions
Problem Solving
Unit rate
Converting mixed numbers to improper fractions

Just in time lecture: Assessment vs Evaluation see Tab 12

Is assessment a concept? Yes, the difference between assessment and evaluation (the mind set of assessment) so the concept of assessment is set but there is also the knowledge process of assessment (can use the tool of SII); the way of being of assessment culture, the specific context of assessing a situation; and assessment can be a tool for growth