Improving Math Placement

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Improving Math Placement is a study that explores how combining high school transcript data with math diagnostic test results can both improve the accuracy of student placement in developmental math courses and improve math instruction.

Research Team

Background and Goals

Many students across the country are placed in developmental math courses in their first year of college to remediate areas missed in high school before being permitted to enroll in college-level math courses. Unfortunately, some of these students are placed in courses below the levels they’ve already mastered, unnecessarily prolonging their community college careers and at times leading them to drop out of college altogether. Many students do not complete or pass their developmental courses, and even students who do succeed in these courses aren’t necessarily prepared for more advanced ones.

The Improving Math Placement project seeks to address these issues. An overarching goal of this project is to develop a placement model that will accurately put students in the most appropriate math course level as they begin their college careers.

To create that model, researchers are combining results from diagnostic test students take when starting community college with high school performance data, then using this information to figure out the placement strategies that would improve student persistence, graduation rates and time to graduation. In addition, the project is identifying ways to improve instruction in college math classes through a collaboration with students and instructors at two community colleges in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Funded by a $299,753 grant from the National Science Foundation, this four-year study began in Oct. 2015 and will run through Sep. 2019.

Funder

This study was funded by a $299,753 EArly-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant from the National Science Foundation. The official title of the grant is “Using High School Transcript Data and Diagnostic Information to Fine-Tune Placement Policy and Tailor Instruction in Developmental Math.”

The contents of this webpage were developed under Grant #1544254 from the National Science Foundation. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the National Science Foundation, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.