Spring 2026: Improving Process Skill Development in Coreq College Algebra - What to do instead of things students hate.

This term I am teaching a corequisite support version of College Algebra at my home institution, and as an educator I am constantly tweaking and changing my courses. There are two changes I'd like to make this term; the first on process skill development which I'll describe here, and the second on better alignment of course activities and student-facing directions of the weekly learning objectives, which I'll talk more about in another post this week.

Process skills, success skills, or foundational skills, are the skills students need to develop and use in order to learn. There are a wide variety of them out there (I also like the CAST UDL Guidelines, and there is overlap with the NACE Career Readiness Competencies) and I use the Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Process Skills; Teamwork, Oral and Written Communication, Management, Information Processing, Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Assessment. Here are the three areas Process Skills will come about in my class this term. 

1. Class Session Agenda - Each class session I make a student-facing agenda that includes group assignments, role assignments, process skill for the day, faculty goal for the day, learning outcomes, exit ticket feedback, and how many pre-class assignments were submitted. The inclusion of the process skill is meant to help students identify the specific skills they are developing, and to nudge them towards behaviors that will help them learn in groups. I then also use it when asking students to reflect about their progress as a group in answering questions together. 
   
   
2. Craft Your Learning - Corequisite support courses have three goals; help students develop prerequisite knowledge to support their understanding of course-level material, have more time for course-level content, and to develop the necessary skills to be successful in a college-level math course. I used to have specific assignments about organizing a binder, reflecting on procrastination, and other skills, but students rarely completed them, and when they did complained about them.
   
   To help with this I started having conversations with the class about what they struggled with. Over time these conversations came around to the same skills I was trying to help them develop, but it wasn't until they recognized the need for the skills themselves did they actually start engaging in these assignments. I have now a developed protocol on how to structure these conversations, focused on having students discuss what they are struggling with in small groups referencing the POGIL Process Skills, and collecting this information anonymously to share out with the class. We then talk about what kind of assignment or activity would have students address this struggle, and then talk about what they did the following week. If you are interested in hearing more and seeing examples, I will share out more during the upcoming POGIL Practitioner Collaborative in June. 
   
   
3. Weekly Process Skill - One thing I would like to try is to have a specific process skill for the week, that I integrate into the goals for the week, exit tickets, and course announcements. I thought I might have this list before the start of the term, but I'm realizing it may be better to think through it as I do my weekly preparations.
   

How have you used process skills in your courses? Yours may not be the ones I use, and students seem to benefit from having the 'hidden curriculum' be made visible and direct. 

Pre-Pre-(Pre?)-Planning: Fall 2021 - Standards based grading, flipped classroom, corequisite support, and maybe group work?

After putting together a grant proposal and wanting to do something other than the list of tasks on my plate left over from last term, I thought I'd spend today prepping for my Fall 2021 course; face-to-face business math. I was really inspired by Matthew Lewis & Michal Ramos from Yakima Valley College, and their talk Thinking About Assessment and Grading Differently: Standards‑Based Grading in Precalculus at WAMATYC this year. Students can get so focused on points and grading, that they act as grades aren't related to understanding. In watching their talk I am hopeful that tying a student's grades directly to their understanding of specific learning objectives, they will be more motivated to do things that actually impact their grade.

This chart really hit home how standards based grading could be accomplished, which I have shared in a past blog post. 

In reviewing their materials it seems that I have a few choices to make. 

• How should I assess the different levels of understanding?
  While they focused on online assessments (using WAMAP) being an online course, I'm thinking of moving some of them to face-to-face assessments. Their plan to have students complete the different levels of understanding of an objective sequentially (An Expert assessment doesn't open up until the Proficient assessment is 100%.) is well done in the system, and the questions themselves are great! Of the Expert questions I looked at, they included things like randomly generated values (a standard in WAMAP),  analyzing an incorrect answer, and short question path with question parts that opened up based on previous responses. All of these things avoid the 'static' questions I see in so many online systems, and would help prevent sharing of solutions and cheating. 
  
  My current thought is to have a similar system in WAMAP where students can complete assignments (homework really) aligned to the Novice and Developing levels of each objective, and students can retake them as much as they want with no penalty. This is also a corequisite support course, so expanding these novice and developing levels to include prerequisite knowledge would seem appropriate. Expert and Proficient levels of objectives would be assessed through face-to-face weekly quizzes, and some other types of assignments, possibly projects, discussion forums, or something else, I'm not sure. I like to limit quizzes to 30 minutes, 5-6 questions, and at the low end this means that I'm limited to something like 25 objectives (5 questions per week * 10 weeks * 1/2 for the number of objectives (Expert and Proficient) I can assess) which seems doable. That leads me to...
• What objectives are you going to focus on?
  Since assessments are directly related to objectives, I'm constrained by how many objectives to include. These would absolutely need to be student readable, so including vague or abstract objectives that 'cover' a lot of content would not be good.
• How to handle retakes?
  Students are not going to get things right the first time, and I need to figure out when this is going to happen. Do I plan on some time at the end of class (10 min) where students can complete a question?
  
• What will feedback look like?
  In focusing on the specific learning objective, and in creating thoughtful rubrics, I am hoping my feedback will be more targeted about the specific area of confusion. Obviously I'll keep providing process feedback, and discussing ways for students to improve their work. 
• No due dates?
  Really? Am I going to be ok with that? In making the assessments the main way students can reach higher levels of each objective I'm hoping they nudge students into preparing for them. At the same time I need to be deliberate and focus their attention on completing their work on a regular basis. 

Because this is a corequisite support course I have a number of success skill assignments tied to different components of the course. The time management assignments are ok, but I feel students don't connect when they should complete their work. I'll be trying to work backwards from the assessments, to the assignments, to what they should be doing each day. I have other such assignments on growth mindset, deep versus shallow processing, etc. but I'm wondering if maybe I should focus on time management as the central skill, and bringing up other affective domain skills through it. For example, sure you block out time for homework, but what should you be doing (and not doing) during that time? If you're feeling unmotivated to complete your schedule, why, what are those unresolved feelings that are motivating your procrastination. 

The course includes eight hours of instruction (5 college-level, 3 pre-college level) but I am only meeting for five hours a week, with the other three being online. In flipping some of that material, especially the prerequisite pre-college material, I'm hoping to make sure students are prepared for class sessions. In not having due dates I'm a little concerned about students not completing the flipped instruction, how else am I going to get them to do it?

For now I feel like I have more questions than answers, but over the summer I'm hoping to dial in a course plan I can use for the year. Here is roughly what I'm thinking;

- July: Decide on course objectives, levels, rubrics, and create some of that material in WAMAP. 

- July 20, 22, 26: I am taking the Flipped Plus Model PCC continuing education course run by Wendy Fresh and Jessica Bernards.

- August: Create flipped instruction videos and linked class materials.

- September: Revisit Success Skill assignments, and decide what would be helpful to students. 

Given my other projects this feels manageable if I spend 10 hours a week on it.

Your thoughts on any of this? Something I'm not seeing or overlooking? Am I going overboard? Let me know in the comments.