It's been HOW long? SBCTC Coreq Workshop and the Quality Improvement Process

It's been a minute and I need to get a few ideas out on 'paper' so you may get a burst of a couple posts today and/or tomorrow.

Went to the SBCTC Corequisite Workshop on Tuesday, November 5th. While there we discussed the current corequisite support courses at various Washington state community colleges. My institution (Clark College) presented data on course outcome attainment rates of our coreq students compared to their standard course colleagues. Overall the data doesn't show a significant difference, but there is room to improve. I don't feel comfortable sharing the data here as we it doesn't really satisfy the conditions for a two-tailed difference of means hypothesis test, but I will say the means are fairly close.

While there one of the presenters Joan Zoellner of the Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (a former colleague of mine) shared the article Tools for Improving Corequisite Models: A guide for College Practitioners from the Rand Corporation. The article provides a really interesting model for identifying problems and how to investigate them. My own quick summary based on the article and Joan's presentation:

Identifying the Problem of Practice: Here you are trying to identify an actual problem to address. Simple enough right? Well in practice my team found it fairly difficult to do. These Problems of Practice can range from granular instructional problems (What can I do to get students to graph rational functions and identify their properties?) to systemic problems (How can we get faculty to use data to improve their instruction?) 

Aim: In a traditional experiment this would be the treatment of the experimental group. For most of us (although there seems to be information in the article on how to do this in the) we are not going to separate students into a control and experimental group, as that would be treating some students differently than others.

Measures: What data will be collected to indicate there was an improvement. 

Changes: Possible solutions that would address the problem of practice, based on the measures. 

This is a deceptively simple way of cutting through all our plans, all our potential improvements, all of our great ideas, and getting to the things we really need to focus on; the problem, how we're going to address it, and how we're going to measure success. Too often in education we do a thing, thinking it'll solve our (perceived most of the time) problem, and then never checking in to see whether it worked. We can't keep going on this tailspin, we need some direction.