…. deer guts on a doorknob, my brother used to say. I found the 2021 “lots of infographics, EVERYTHING IS PERFECT!!!” sales blurb for corequisites.
So “We’ve Got Numerical Outcomes, Now What?” has some AWESOME statistics … without references … DETAILS!!! (The references go to an article about how to get data and … The “No Room for Doubt: Moving Corequisite Support from Idea to Imperative” is rather similar to the “Bridge to Nowhere,” though it doesn’t say anything like “works for as many as half.” It does spend a lot of time talking about how to do corequisites but there is, sorry, zero, zilch nada evidence that it improves *anything* long term, or that it isn’t still rife with horrible success for math.
Hey, it’s only missing …. well, research details. Yes, it highlights CUNY and how more of those folks graduated. All the other highlights are about the percent of folks completing. Again, we’re given “percent improvement” not “percent of people who actually passed.”
Interesting study here about “do the details matter” wherein they reveal that the most successful corequisites for math were very different than for English — that the best ones had the corequisite course *right after* the regular. Erm, no, they didn’t give pass rates, just noted that one worked better than the others.
Key phrase from the full report here:
and then mainstreaming
students who were assessed as needing modest developmental assistance with the requirement
that they enroll in a corequisite support course.15
They had 2 stand-alone dv ed courses. Duly note that the co-req rah rah NEVER MENTIONS THAT.
Oh, they duly note that “surprisingly little investigation of how the design and execution of the corequisites bear on students’ outcomes.” As in, nope, nobody talks about *how they’re teaching.*
Oh, and having a “cohort,” like a learning community seems to work well, too, for helping them pass the math course — even though it’s really hard to do administratively. Oh, and “any benefit of a learning community approach to corequisite supported college courses may not extend to coursework in later terms.” Oh, and grades are *lower* when it’s full time math faculty teaching it as opposed to part time, but they might do better in later courses.
And let’s talk sample size, SNORK!!! “We would hae 1-2 students in the coreq class.” Later on: “On average, math corequisite supports had 13 students enrolled (median of 12 students).” No, at NO POINT do they indicate what the pass rate actually was. The co-req was 17% points more likely to succeed — I HOPE that’s say, from 20 to 37? (Not 17% more than there were before, like the Texas debacle). However, we’re still filtering out all the folks not in the “needing modest support” category, and there are rather many of them, too. If they were included in the data?
Resource Room Dot Net Blog 
Posted on May 12, 2023
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