More than a decade ago, Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon, took a look at its data for students enrolled in career and technical education programs. What they found was that many students were able to progress through their degree program, but one course in many cases stopped them from completion: math. The school’s math department then began to design courses tailored to specific degree programs. Since 2017, 93% of students in a math course designed for welders have passed the class. Steven Yoder is a freelance journalist who wrote about the trend of more Oregon colleges offering applied math courses. He joins us to share more.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We start today with “Math For Welders.” That’s a course at Linn-Benton Community College. It was created to help prevent students from dropping out and it’s working. It’s just one example of tailoring math classes to specific skills and disciplines as a way to engage students who might otherwise struggle with the subject. And it’s an area where Oregon seems to be leading the way. Steven Yoder is a freelance journalist who wrote about this recently for The Hechinger Report. He joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Steven Yoder: Hello.
Miller: So before we talk about this kind of solution, I want to start with the problem. What did Linn-Benton Community College leaders find about a dozen years ago when they looked into how their CTE students – career and technical education students – were faring?
Yoder: As you say, about a dozen years ago, the administrators at Linn-Benton went and looked at their data, and found that a huge number of their students in these current technical fields, who were studying to get into current technical fields, were dropping out. They couldn’t get through the math requirement in these degree fields. And they weren’t alone in this. Another school I visited for the reporting on the story, found the same thing about the same time frame.
So the administrators tasked the math department with coming up with tailored math classes that were designed with exercises that would tackle specific problems that these folks coming out with these degrees would face in the field. The idea was, the theory was, students are going to do better if they can see that what they’re learning is directly applicable to the degree that they’re going for.
Miller: What is it about math in particular? Why is it the subject that students at Linn-Benton, and I think at other schools as well, were most likely to need help with?
Yoder: That’s sort of a research question. That’s an interesting question we didn’t report directly on. I think that’s a common experience. The students I talked to at the schools I visited, the course they most struggled with in high school was math. And I think, in part, one of the bases for designing courses the way Linn-Benton did was that math starts with the theory, and you learn the theory, you apply it in a bunch of different problems. Then maybe you learn how it applies to something that may or may not be relevant to your life or something that matters to you. And what the folks teaching applied math – the folks at Linn-Benton who designed their “Math For Welders” courses and other courses like it – said was, let’s start with a problem. Let’s make math a tool that [students] can use to solve a problem that they need to solve. And then let’s teach the principle behind the tool.
Miller: So the reverse of the way it often happens. Can you describe what you saw when you went into a classroom at Linn-Benton Community College?
Yoder: Yes. I was in the “Math For Welders” class for two days. And the students were tasked with the job of designing, figuring out the spacing on the rungs for a steel ladder that would attach to a wall. Sounds like a relatively straightforward problem. Turns out there are federal regulations on rung spacing which has to be quite exact. It has to be exactly the same space between rungs. The top rung has to be flush with the top of the wall, and your customer is gonna want different rung spacings depending on their needs and depending on the cost. So like you could set this up, it’s really an algebra problem in part. You have a few variables that you know and you’re trying to solve for a third variable, which in this case was the rung spacing. So that’s what students were doing.
Michael Lopez, the instructor there who’s also designed a number of these courses, was teaching that day. He gave [students] an algorithm for solving this problem. He didn’t describe it as an algebra problem. It was a ladder problem. It was a problem, “save your customer money and get it right, because if you don’t get it right, this ladder has to be torn out and you have to start over.” And thousands of dollars are at stake in these things. So students care a lot. As he told them, you want to make your mistakes here, not after you get your degree and are out working in the field.
Miller: What about Rogue Community College in Grants Pass? What did you see there?
Yoder: Well, in 2010, there was a math instructor there, a guy named Doug Gardner. He actually has a background as a construction contractor. But he’s also a math guy. He got his degree in math, but he says he never learned anything practical in all of his college years in taking math. At Rogue [Community College], he kept getting a question from students that he didn’t have a good answer to. And that was “why do we need to know this?” And he never had the answer. It could not just be for the next course. He said he wanted to give students a reason and he made that his sort of life’s work.
So he got grants to design two applied algebra courses that substitute for the traditional algebra courses the school offered back in 2010. The applied algebra course I sat in on, we were working with Pythagorean theorem and you can learn Pythagorean theorem in a really applied practical way it turns out. And we did that in the class I sat in on, but they’ve had really good results which I can describe a little more.
Miller: What are the results, whether at Rogue Community College or up I-5 a bit, at Linn-Benton? I mean, how big a difference has applied math made as opposed to more abstract math?
Yoder: At Rogue – in Grants Pass – the students taking the applied algebra courses are passing at a rate that’s about 14 percentage points higher than the students taking the traditional algebra courses. That’s a huge win in academia. I talked to some folks that said if you get 2% improvement, you’re doing well. So they’ve really achieved a lot.
Then the people at Linn-Benton … and I have to say who are the most enthusiastic about these math courses are not the math instructors. It’s the welding instructors. Their students, they say, are coming to them after this “Math For Welders” course with a really solid grasp of math. And so they’re not having to spend time in the welding courses going backwards to give them the math fundamentals they used to have to give them to get through the course or to get proficient. But the “Math For Welders” course – 93% of students are passing that course according to the school’s data, which is a big improvement.
Miller: We asked listeners on Facebook what they thought would have helped them with math in school. We got a bunch of comments.
Robin Ricker wrote, “Making it relevant and tangible. Maybe plan and lay out an actual garden or make a quilt or do fundraising, a business plan and sell something from a trade program in high school.”
Christina Elliott wrote, “Understanding from the educational system that some people just don’t think in math terms. Algebra was horrible, but I’ve been a bookkeeper all my professional life. Practical, applicable math is often more important for success in the future than finding X.”
And Dawn Bausch wrote, “Spending more time seeing how it could be feasible, used in actual real life situations like carpentry or planning a budget.”
You make a point in your article that stood out to me, given I’m so used to hearing – and I think listeners are so used to hearing – the ways in which Oregon can fall short nationally in terms of educational outcomes. But you say that we are a kind of leader nationwide in this version of math education. In what ways is Oregon at the forefront?
Yoder: In this kind of math, in using applied math, Oregon really is a leader. I talked to James Stone. He runs a place called the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education and he trains schools, mostly at the high school level, on this way of teaching math. He told me, Oregon for some reason, is way ahead on this. This applied approach does seem to be spreading in Oregon.
Part of it is because Doug Gardner wrote a curriculum that he’s sharing for free with other community colleges. A number of colleges are using his curriculum. The two models are a little bit different because [with] Gardner’s approach, any student can take these applied algebra courses at Rogue. Whereas, at Linn-Benton, the applied math courses are specifically designed for welding, for culinary, for criminal justice, for automotive and so forth.
Miller: What are the challenges here in making this more broadly available?
Yoder: James Stone told me he has done some work with community colleges around the country who express interest. And the thing they keep running into is … I mean, this is a resource intensive process to design tailored courses because it means the math department has to sit down with the technical degree instructors, and they have to together figure out what students in a technical degree field need, what math skills they need. And so it takes about a year to do this and community colleges often have part-time instructors. So they just don’t have, he told me, the resources to do that.
And at these two schools in Oregon, it’s a little bit unique. I mean, they invested in this. But Gardner at Rogue, he’s a construction contractor, still is, designs houses. And at Linn-Benton, you’ve got the person, Michael Lopez, designing these courses. He was himself a carpenter, a sheriff’s deputy, he served in Iraq. So a lot of applied skills too. So you may have some unique folks who are really interested in and able to implement this kind of approach.
Miller: Steven Yoder, thanks very much.
Yoder: Thanks a lot, Dave.
Miller: Steven Yoder is a freelance journalist. He wrote about Oregon’s community college efforts to create applied math classes for The Hechinger Report.
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