The CORE Program
CORE stands for “Celebration of Diversity, Opening Access, Relevance,
and Excellence”. The CORE Mission Statement defines and then
institutes a University Studies Liberal Art Core Program and a High
School to College Bridge Program in Liberal Arts Studies.
The two programs are to be integrated as a seamless opening of access
to
higher education for underserved student populations. A web
technology-based infrastructure will support recruitment and retention
goals. The University Studies Program is designed to be marketed
external from colleges and universities using a community center for
profit business with locations next to colleges and universities across
the nation. <*>
The Univerity Studies Program will be marketed under the
SecondSchool.net brand name, and will offer web based Lifting Pedagogy
to enrolled freshman students.
Next steps
Innovation and purpose are the two hallmarks
of leadership. Purpose is reflected in most College Mission
Statements, and in all programs undertaken by the administration and
faculty. In many colleges, a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) that
focuses on the freshman experience will further demonstrate CORE
leadership. Funding proposals to NSF and to the Department of
Education will seek external funds to build the CORE prototype and
demonstrate functional success. As for the academic year
2008-2009, the committee needs some time to develop funding proposals;
as well as to produce some advanced research results related to the
grounding of the lifting pedagogy and learning theory in natural
science. Planning now has a focus on the
academic year 2009-2010.
Underlying
assertion of the CORE Mission Statement
It is proposed that underserved students
accommodate a cycle of failure with respect to university
studies. A number of scholars point out that our schools and
popular culture reinforces this cycle of failure. In the proposed
Bridge and Freshman Studies Programs, this assertion is taken
seriously. Adequate resources are used directly with the
expectation that the cycle of failure may be set aside, in almost all
cases. Given a change in approach, and marked increased in
success, the result will be more and better students.
Innovation in
pedagogy and curriculum
The author has proposed a specific innovation
in pedagogy and curriculum for enhancement studies in
mathematics. In his prior work on Quality Enhancement Programs,
as Chair of Mathematics at a small HBCU in Alabama, a recommendation
was made that a core curriculum be identified for developmental
purposes. He proposed, in part, that a core enhancement program
should have elements from mathematics, English communication skills,
and the humanities. There is agreement about this part of the
proposal. The proposed innovation in pedagogy and actual curriculum is
where some work is needed.
Lessons learned
from other University Studies Programs
Mathematics remediation is a profound
problem. Freshman Studies Programs at several universities actually
remove analytic skills from the mission statement of the remediation
and developmental programs, causes additional harm to the
students. The phrase “analytic skills” is used, but developmental
mathematics and freshman mathematics are still taught by the department
of mathematics using traditional methods. The unsolvable part of
the problem is left in the status quo. A new strategy comes with
an innovation in pedagogy and curriculum designed to alter this status
quo.
The school system and the college/university
system are not on the same page. University departments of
mathematics are focused in providing a quality presentation of higher
mathematics, and in advancing the body of mathematics.
Mathematics education has found a place within the universities but has
not as yet found a paradigm that recognizes a solution to the problems
of poor and under preparation. As a result of these
considerations we believe that an enahncement program should be
separated from the departments of mathematics, as a general
principle. It should be clear that the approach we are making
requires faculty development and training as well as in-class and web
based support materials. The enhancement program should produce
students prepared to advance into mathematics and sciences, with
renewed interest and capacity.
Opening Access to
underserved populations
The second CORE principle is that of opening
access to higher education for underserved student populations.
Academic communities agree that English communication skill and the
humanities is an essential part of opening access to scholarship in all
disciplines. There is some disagreement, caused by frustration;
over whether mathematics, as traditionally taught in the freshman year,
is relevant to the current generation of students. This
disagreement is exceedingly complex and should be by-passed through a
strategy appeasing both sides of the disagreement.
The author has defined and demonstrated what
is called the “lifting pedagogy”. The lifting
pedagogy asserts that an “Acquired Learning Disability” constrains the
behavior of entering freshman students and that a full remediation is
possible in almost all cases. The lifting pedagogy has two
phases, engagement followed by acceleration. <*>
As demonstrated in the academic year
2007-2008 and again this year, the pedagogy and curriculum innovations
in the lifting pedagogy may be applied to all entering freshman
students who fail to pass the standardized mathematics placement
exam. It was demonstrated that as much as 30% of entering
freshman, placed into the lifting pedagogy based mathematics
instruction, may be moved to standard college liberal arts studies
after the first three weeks of class. During these three weeks,
these students can be motivated by the opportunity to test out of
developmental mathematics, and be accelerated into the traditional
freshman course work. It is entirely possible that these students
have a radically improved chance of completing the freshman year and
going on to graduate within four years.
On the prior
experience
We may generalize from the experiences in
2007-2008. In this academic year, at the small college in
Alabama, we had 194 entering freshman, 192 of which did not pass the
mathematics entrance exams. All students in all sections of
developmental mathematics as well as in the freshman college
mathematics courses were given a specific remediation curriculum, as
discussed in “Institutionalizing Developmental Curriculums”
(IDC). A blank paper testing procedure and lecture by topic
presentation pedagogy is discussed in IDC. For three weeks the
two-professor department used testing and presentation procedures
uniformly. At the end of this three week period all students
earning an A on the blank paper test were encouraged to drop his or her
course and add a higher level mathematics course. Of the 192
students, 63 made this change and went on the make an A or B in the
higher-level course.
The strategy created smaller enhancement
classes, while adding new sections of the higher lever courses.
Ideally, original enrollment should be caped at 35 students; with the
expectation that 10 will move out of this class. Students
interested in the challenge should leave open his or her schedule in
alignment with classes that will open only after the first three weeks.
The traditional retention rate at the small
college was 20%. Over the past decade, 80% of freshman students
failed or dropped mathematics. During the academic year 2007-2008
the retention rate was 85% passing, most with a grade of A or B.
This evidence is applied to the conjecture that Acquired Learning
Disability (ALD) can be cured completely in most cases. <*>
Relationship to
the proposed Education Grid
In the five-part thesis “Transforming
Mathematics Education” (Prueitt, 2008) the author places the Lifting
Pedagogy into the context of supply and demand models for economic,
entertainment and educational systems.
“The creation of a not for profit
communications grid for educational processes was considered to be a
reasonable social domain for deployment of technology consistent with
the new communications paradigm. Funding is the only real
issue. The author developed the position that the application of
this new paradigm to the entire educational system might be funded as a
single federal program. Because of his work on this technology, the
author is able to use the principles developed to advance a learning
theory, and supporting web based technology. This is regarded as
a first step in proposing this communications grid, now called the
Education Grid.
“There is no under-estimation of the
difficulties. What we have is a principled plan that starts with
the development of a web based support system for the bridge between
high school and college. This bridge will not use the software
paradigm discussed below and is thus not dependent on market forces
finding the necessary capitalization. The bridge will be designed
programmatically.”
Funding for a commercial enterprise whose
focus is back-plate technology is a task that faces a number of
barriers. The committee's five-year plan for developing the
bridge program between high school and college depends on a commercial
enterprise. The use of architectural principles in the web
component of the bridge program will illustrate the back-plate
principles, but only as an approximation.
The next presentation will start into the software design
characteriztics necessary to create a demand side information
system.