Student forum gauges future of Math Emporium
For USD students of the past several years, the Math Emporium has been an occasional source of headache and frustration, and sometimes serious irritation.
For this reason, the known issues with the emporium were brought forth during an SGA-sponsored discussion Tuesday night in the Center for Diversity & Community in the MUC, and drew a crowd of nearly 30 students and faculty.
The main speaker during the event was math department chair Dan Van Peursem, who said early in the forum that USD students aren’t alone in their struggles with the study of numbers.
“There is a national problem with learning mathematics,” he said.
Unfortunately, said Van Peursem, college algebra has only about a 50 percent success rate nationally. Success rates for pre-college algebra are even worse, as low as 30 or 40 percent, he said.
The root of the issue has much to do with the way mathematics is taught to students, Van Peursem said.
“All students are treated the same,” but “people don’t learn at the same rate,” Van Peursem said.
The problem is that, even if one or several students struggle with one concept or another, the class will proceed on, despite the fact that math builds upon itself. Missing one concept will cripple a student’s success in learning the next concept, Van Peursem said.
On top of that, Van Peursem said that students aren’t engaged in their college math classes, which go at a pace about “four times as fast” compared to high school math classes.
For these reasons, in a bid to try to improve student success rates in math, USD ushered in the concept of the Math Emporium – in which students can receive frequent math help and assessment – six years ago.
Van Peursem discussed the various benefits of the emporium, such as students’ ability to learn at their own pace, view videos of lectures and receive instant feedback on assignments.
Statistics presented by Van Peursem showed that students who attended roughly the assigned amount of hours of the emporium were the most likely to pass their classes, and that very few of those who scarcely went passed their classes.
However, he also presented somewhat contradictory statistics for the past three years, which showed significant drops in math class success rates since the fall of 2013, declining from 81 percent success in 2013 to 66 percent in 2015.
The reasons for the falling success rates aren’t entirely clear, Van Peursem said, though he attributed some of the decline between 2013-2014 to software issues with education company Pearson, which he said have since been resolved.
The statistics for pre-college algebra are worse, with success rates dropping from 57 percent in 2013 to 44 percent in 2015.
After his energetic defense of the Math Emporium, Van Peursem and SGA president Sami Zoss opened the floor to questions and comments from the audience.
The audience provided a wide variety of feedback and suggestions for the emporium, ranging from “printable worksheets” to changing the classes back to a lecture format – which Van Peursem declined to do.
One audience member said that she was left “completely burnt out” by the Math Emporium, and that she is simply “too overworked” by its demands.
SGA Senator Marcus Ireland, along with others in the audience, felt that “students feel that they have to teach themselves” in the emporium.
Zoss also brought up the idea of a supplemental instruction session to go along with the emporium instruction. Van Peursem said the department tried that previously, but there was little to no attendance.
When asked by SGA vice president Michael Buchanan what changes have been implemented as a result of the slipping success rates in Math Emporium classes, Van Peursem said that “we don’t have the ‘golden nugget’ as to why they (scores) went down.”
