Formal Charge
Indiana’s Math Innovation Council was charged with publishing and implementing recommendations for differentiated, program-aligned mathematics in support of student success. In order to meet this charge, the council identified four questions to guide its work:
- How can we increase success rates in gateway courses without compromising the integrity of mathematics?
- How can we best align mathematics requirements to give students competency in the kinds of mathematical tasks that will be required for their career success?
- What additional courses need to be developed in Indiana to accomplish goals (1) and (2)?
- How might program requirements be enhanced to help accomplish goals (1) and (2)?
Through faculty-driven discussions from math faculty at all public institutions, the council answered the guiding questions and published the following recommendations in its task force reportview full resourceDownloadFile.
“The Council recommended that institutions offer a quantitative reasoning course, drawing from a common framework, and make that the default math course for most non-STEM majors. It further recommended that the default gateway course for STEM majors should be calculus, reserving algebraic content for student [sic] unprepared for calculus" (Indiana Commission for Higher Education, 2015).
Since Fall 2014, Ivy Tech Community College, Indiana’s largest public postsecondary institution, has implemented accelerated math pathways through one-semester corequisite remediation. This effort, supported by Complete College America and documented in the report Corequisite Remediation: Spanning the Divide, has resulted in a dramatic improvement in student success rates, increasing from 29% to 64% of students completing their gateway math course.