Community and videos: An action plan to increase success rates in California community college developmental mathematics

Success rates in California community college developmental mathematics courses have hovered around 50% for decades. These gatekeeper courses have prevented many students from earning college degrees. Since community college is the starting point for the majority of California's potential college graduates and the majority of these students require one to three developmental mathematics courses, there is a systemic problem with dismal success rates in developmental mathematics courses. This study employed an action research design in an attempt to increase the success rates, retention rates, and test scores of the students in two Intermediate Algebra courses. The action plan was firmly grounded in cognitive learning theory, empirical evidence, and best practice literature. The action plan included two fundamental components: providing students with Internet access to educational math videos and creating a sense of community. Approximately 200 short (generally two to four minute), modularly constructed, videos were created using software capable of recording voice and screen content. Educational math videos help to solve a classroom cognitive overload problem faced by all mathematics students, provide unlimited access to instructor output, encourage student engagement, and they are very strongly endorsed by students. A sense of community was established by proactively promoting interaction and adding an online component to the course. The online component enhanced the traditional face-to-face classroom by including a second communications channel enabling community building resulting from additional-timetogether. By delegating some mathematical content to videos viewed outside of class time, in-class time was made available for engagement in community engendering activities. The results of the first iteration of the action plan were very successful from a qualitative perspective and achieved several statistically significant improvements from a quantitative perspective. Enhanced success is anticipated in the next iteration of an improved action plan. Societal rewards for an effective action plan to increase success rates in developmental mathematics at the community college level are profound. Developmental mathematics instructors may find the action plan described in this dissertation to be adaptable to their context and it may serve as a starting point for improving their professional practice.