Statway: Creating New Pathways of Success Through College for Underprepared Students

The Statway initiative of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin is an innovative attempt to solve a systemic problem in mathematics education: how to teach developmental math to students who enter college without the preparation they need for college-level work. The result could transform mathematics education, integrating statistics and making higher level math more accessible to students for whom it is a “barrier course” to graduation. 

Organizations at-a-Glance:

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center that supports needed transformations in American education through tighter connections between teaching practice, evidence of student learning, the communication and use of this evidence, and structured opportunities to build knowledge. For over a century, the improvement of teaching and learning has been central to all of the Foundation’s work. The Foundation brings together researchers, teachers, policymakers, and members of organizations with common interests in education. It works to invent new knowledge and to develop tools and ideas that allow innovators to foster positive change and enhanced learning in the nation’s schools.

The Dana Center’s mission is to increase the diversity of students who successfully pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. It was founded in 1991 and is one of the largest research units in the College of Natural Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Working toward excellence in education, research, and public service, the Center is committed to ensuring that the academic opportunities a child pursues are not limited by the school he or she attends. The Dana Center works to raise student achievement in K–16 mathematics and science, especially for historically underserved populations. The center’s staff of more than 60 researchers and education professionals provide direct services to schools, districts, and institutions of higher education; to local, state, and national education leaders; and to nonprofits, agencies, and professional organizations working to strengthen American mathematics and science education. The center has worked intensively with dozens of school systems in nearly 20 states and with 90 percent of Texas’s more than 1,000 school districts.

Designing for Achievement:

A recent focus of both the Dana Center’s and the Carnegie Foundation’s higher education work has been to strengthen “developmental” mathematics education, the non-credit-bearing courses that many students are required to take to be eligible for credit-bearing college math. Developmental math is intended to open doors for students who enter college underprepared for college-level work, but it is widely recognized that the courses often have the opposite effect. In response, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has teamed up with the Dana Center to redesign developmental education by creating an integrated pathway to and through statistics—the Statway.

“Our approach,” notes Carnegie Foundation President Anthony Bryk, “will bring together a diverse network of practitioners, researchers, social entrepreneurs, policymakers, students, and other stakeholders to map the many dimensions of the problem, identify promising solutions, and foster the design and continuous improvement of new, more effective, evidence-based models for developmental mathematics.”

Statistical literacy enables reasoning under conditions of uncertainty—uncertainty being an inescapable condition of modern life.

Existing developmental mathematics sequences typically consist of three, four, or even five courses designed to teach students algebra as required preparation for calculus—a curricular sequence that is appropriate for students who intend to major in mathematics-intensive STEM fields but often less useful for students with other education and career goals. Developmental students also need to become engaged with mathematical thinking and development and application of math skills. Through innovative instructional strategies that build underlying math skills at the same time as students are learning college-level material, students who participate in the Statway will be able to complete an academically rigorous, credit-bearing, and transferable mathematics course in just one academic year.

The primary curricular goal of the Statway course sequence is to develop student proficiency in important core areas of mathematics, with a special focus on statistical literacy. Statistical literacy enables reasoning under conditions of uncertainty—uncertainty being an inescapable condition of modern life. It is a core skill for effective citizenship, which regularly calls on individuals to be informed consumers of data and to make important decisions on the basis of that data. Statistics is an area of study that students may well find both engaging and relevant to their daily lives.

Statway lessons are designed to improve teaching and learning by presenting real problems in contexts that enable students to learn and think quantitatively. Problem-solving, which has been shown to improve application and recall of mathematical concepts, is the core instructional experience. The Statway enhances the coherence of the developmental mathematics sequence by reducing the time it takes to complete a credit-bearing transferable course and giving students skills that will help them succeed in their academic programs and careers. To ensure rigor and high quality, the statistical learning outcomes of the Statway are aligned with the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) and Advanced Placement standards.

Statway reduces the time it takes to complete a credit-bearing transferable course and gives students skills that will help them succeed in their academic programs and careers.

The Statway is an evidence-based research and design initiative developed by a network of faculty and administrators across institutions in many states. The group will use the same rich, formative assessments and learning tools, linked by technology, in order to learn from one another’s work. To focus on ways to raise student understanding and achievement, particularly for students who have struggled with math in the past, group members will explore and share experiences on topics such as new approaches to pedagogy, developing lessons plans that are truly relevant and motivating, and the use of technology.

Currently, 19 colleges are participating in Statway, with plans to scale the initiative to include approximately 112 colleges after 5 years.