Community Colleges: Across the United States nearly 1,200 community colleges play a vital role in higher education. They enroll more than 11.5 million students — nearly half of all undergraduates — and they attract high proportions of low-income, minority and first-generation college students. Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count is a national initiative to help more community college students succeed, particularly students of color and low-income students. The initiative works on multiple fronts — including efforts at community colleges and in research, public engagement and public policy — and emphasizes the use of data to drive change. More...

Overcoming math anxiety

Math is often a stumbling block for at-risk students. “Research indicates that students who withdraw from beginning algebra classes tend to withdraw from college,” says Terrie Teegarden, head of the math department at San Diego Mesa College and director of a Lumina Foundation-funded project to identify, promote and implement strategies that help improve performance in algebra.

Terrie Teegarden, math professor, San Diego Mesa College

The statistics she quotes are sobering: The overall algebra success rate at California’s community colleges is 46.4 percent. That rate drops to 42 percent for Hispanic students and 33.5 percent for African-Americans. “This is beginning algebra,” she explains, “the same class that eighth-graders should be able to pass.”
Teegarden attributes students’ poor performance to lackluster teaching methods and to society’s general acceptance of weak math skills. “Too many parents excuse their children’s poor grades by saying, ‘You must have inherited my genes; I wasn’t good in math either.’ ”

The project that Teegarden and her task force colleagues have designed to address the problem is multifaceted. It calls for the establishment of six regional resource centers where math educators and researchers will interact with college faculty members, document best practices, conduct workshops and build support systems. A Web site eventually will disseminate information on programs that yield positive results, particularly among at-risk students. Teegarden hopes that the task force’s efforts to discover and disseminate ideas and methods will have far-reaching effects. The stakes are high because beginning algebra draws the largest enrollment of any class offered at the community-college level and often is a deciding factor in students’ long-term career plans. “If they can’t get through this one class, they say, ‘College isn’t for me,’ and they quit altogether.”

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