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Traditionally, college students who don’t have ACT or math placement exam scores high enough to place into college algebra are placed into intermediate algebra, a developmental math course that serves as a perquisite to college algebra for those students. However, this prerequisite approach has chronically low student success rates at many institutions.

Enter the corequisite approach, in which these students take college algebra along with a second, support course concurrently. The idea is that students who aren’t quite ready for college algebra will get the just-in-time support they need in their support course. The coreq approach is so successful that an increasing number of states are mandating that colleges and university at least offer the option and in some cases, do away with the prereq approach altogether.

What does it take to make a successful corequisite college algebra course? I wanted to find out, so I reached out to a few colleagues who have been doing this for a while. On this episode, you’ll hear from Tina Ragsdale, teaching enhancement coordinator at West Kentucky Community and Technical College; James Kimball, master instructor and assistant department head in mathematics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; and Kathy Almy, longtime math educator and currently CEO of Almy Education. We have a fantastic conversation about the coreq approach to college algebra, and I think that anyone with an interest in college students success will find it enlightening.

Episode Resources:

·       “Co-requisite Redesign Leads to Increased College Algebra Success and College Completion,” Tina Ragsdale, Renea Akin, and Geelyn Warren, https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/jarihe/vol4/iss1/5/ 

·       Almy Education, https://www.almyeducation.com/ 

·       James Kimball’s faculty website, https://math.louisiana.edu/node/122 

·       College Algebra with Corequisite Support, an OpenStax textbook by Jay Abramson and Sharon North, https://openstax.org/details/books/college-algebra-corequisite-support-2e?Book%20details 

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