Remediation to college algebra: Factors affecting persistence and success in underprepared students

Successful completion of a college-level mathematics course is required for most baccalaureate degrees in the United States. Higher education has recognized the underpreparedness issue and responded through remediation. The literature surrounding remediation has generally focused on three areas: completion of, attrition during or after, and graduation rates of those that remediate. An under-explored area of this field is the subsequent success and persistence in coursework, like college-level algebra, of those that successfully remediate.;The purpose of this ex post facto study was to determine the relationship of student demographics to grade information and college performance data; and the extent to which these variables could be used to predict student success in remedial mathematics through college-level algebra. The variables examined in the study included gender, race/ethnicity, age, type of community in which one resides, secondary credentials, enrollment status, college GPA, method of instructional delivery, other remedial enrollment, family status (marital and dependents), household income, and generation of the college student.;The population of the study consisted of 1,198 students that completed the remedial mathematics course during the 2008--2009 school year at the participating open enrollment, multi-campus proprietary institution. Descriptive statistics including frequencies and percentages, Pearson chi-square, and discriminant analysis were used in the analysis of student data. Cross-tabulation procedures were employed to construct contingency tables of the chi-square analyses. Standardized residuals were used to determine the greatest contributor to the chi-square value when the level of significance was met. A stepwise discriminant analysis was used to determine which of the variables could be used to predict success in remedial mathematics as well as college algebra.;The findings of the study reflected that race/ethnicity, enrollment status, college GPA, and method of instructional delivery had the strongest relationships with student success in remedial mathematics. The best predictors of student success in remedial mathematics were college GPA, enrollment status, instructional delivery in a classroom setting, race/ethnicity, age, family status---marital status/dependents, and household income. In college algebra, the best predictors of student success were college GPA and the method of instructional delivery where students completed the course in a classroom setting.