College students need strong math foundation

BANGOR – Students who don’t understand fractions likely haven’t grasped other math basics either, a University College of Bangor instructor said Wednesday.

“That means they don’t understand decimals which means they don’t understand percentages,” said Ann Blanke.

Many UCB students – including those who are non-traditional – lack a solid foundation in math and must take developmental, or remedial, courses. But now a group of educators has come up with recommendations aimed at helping students graduate from high school better prepared for college math.

University of Maine System Chancellor Joseph Westphal’s Committee on College Readiness is proposing that students use their senior year of high school to focus on fundamental math skills including algebra, computation, mathematical reasoning and geometry.

The idea is to reduce the number of students required to take the college developmental courses, which may keep them from graduating in four years.

“For many students, it would be far more useful to take an additional math course in their senior year that focuses on the fundamental building blocks of math rather than introducing calculus or trigonometry or logarithms and other topics that they might never use if they’re not in a math or science field,” said Chris LeGore, a University of Maine at Augusta associate math professor who co-chaired the committee. University faculty would work with high schools to develop those senior year courses, she said.

As of fall 2004, nearly 1,500 students were enrolled in remedial math courses in the university system, which has a total undergraduate student population of about 30,000.

There also is some concern about how the remedial classes are currently taught, because many students don’t do as well as university officials would like.

So, to ensure success for students who must take college developmental math courses, the committee hopes soon to receive a six-year $225,000 MELMAC grant that would enable campuses to offer those classes using new techniques and strategies. The grant also would support a “best practices” conference for universities to be offered this fall, LeGore told the UMS board of trustees recently.

High schools are focusing too narrowly on esoteric math concepts that don’t prepare students majoring in liberal arts, said LeGore, whose 13-member committee included math faculty from all seven UMS campuses as well as representatives from adult education, the Maine Math and Science Alliance and the Maine Department of Education.

“High schools think you need to have all these different topics and are in a hurry to teach these different topics,” she said.

“But what we’re saying is, take your time and have students be really comfortable with some of the foundations in math.”

UCB’s Blanke said she liked the committee’s recommendations. “To have calculus is great, but if all you get is a lukewarm understanding, it would be much better to have a solid foundation in math,” she said. “Math shows up in so many disciplines from business and economics to psychology.”

The college readiness committee also endorsed the idea of requiring students to take four years of math in high school.

The state’s current requirement that high school students have a minimum of two years of math is at odds with its aim to have 80 percent of all graduates be successful in college, LeGore said.

The skills needed for success in general education math will be distributed to high schools and published in all of the university system’s catalogues, she said.

More information is available at www.maine.edu/collegeready.