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Students who cannot complete gateway courses face a significant barrier to succeeding in college, which is why it’s so important to reduce DFWI rates in these courses by optimizing them to better support students. Identifying gateway courses and improving student support in them can lead to an overall increase in student success at the institution.
Optimizing these crucial courses is the focus of the Gardner Institute’s Gateway Course Redesign Process, which over 100 institutions have participated in. The three-year-long process helps departments reconsider curricula and approach to teaching to improve student learning, and with that, outcomes, grades, retention, and graduation.
The Gardner Institute is applying the expertise it has developed through that program as one of several partners with Every Learner Everywhere in a new initiative to help math departments implement AI-enabled courseware in gateway Calculus I as part of a coordinated instructional model. Gardner Institute’s role in the project is to provide support for professional learning and development of faculty in math departments as they optimize their Calculus I courses.
Drawing on their experience assisting departments to optimize courses, they are helping 12 institutions in the Lighthouse initiative to align courseware customizations to syllabi and learning objectives, make data-informed decisions, and sustain coordination.
The full three-year version of the Gardner Institute’s process for working with departments involves three phases.
Phase 1: Analyze and plan
The first step is to understand where success does and doesn’t happen in gateway courses and for which students, but not all institutions look at granular data within the courses.
Stephanie M. Foote, the Vice President for Teaching, Learning, and Evidence-Based Practices at the Gardner Institute, says that departments, programs, and faculty may not know their student success or DFWI rates, and even when they do know them, they may not have an understanding of exactly who is successful or not in their courses. They need to be able to have access to disaggregated data that allows them to see trends over time by section, by instructor, by student population, or how their data compares to other courses at the institution.
And they may not see how the final grades correlate with other data points produced during the course that hint at where interventions or changes might be useful. That information might include activity data such as time on task or performance data such as scores on weekly practice activities.
To optimize a gateway course, “you need to see if there are particular identity groups that are not succeeding in your course,” says Foote. Choices about course design, pedagogy, structure, materials, and can be informed by understanding the needs of the specific students.
That’s why Gardner Institute’s Gateway Course Redesign Process begins with a self-study to look at undergraduate student success data. A committee of faculty teaching gateway courses inventories the data in a disaggregated format, then goes through key performance indicators.
As the faculty work through the process and come up with different recommendations for optimizing the course, those are reviewed by a steering committee. That committee includes stakeholders such as department chairs, deans, associate deans, and other individuals who work in faculty development or other advisory capacities.
Phase 2: Act and monitor
Once data has been analyzed and recommendations are developed, faculty and the institution begin to implement the recommendations.
Foote says when she was first introduced to course design years ago, the idea was to throw everything out and start over. Now, it’s considered more effective to make incremental and measurable changes. “Most faculty don’t have time, or even the desire, to throw everything out and start over, but they are usually willing to make small changes,” she says.
Some recommendations, like using open educational resources, might be applied by faculty to the classroom right away. Other changes in policy and practice might take months or years to implement.
“The whole process is really focused on continuous improvement,” says Foote.
Many of the incremental changes the Gardner Institute has seen to be effective fall under the heading of creating trust quickly with students. Those include implementing a liquid syllabus, a wisdom wall, or applying transparency in learning and teaching (TILT). Other practices include more active and experiential learning, and helping students to have a stronger growth mindset.
Increasing the amount of support built into a gateway course can also be effective. That can include the integration of academic success services, embedded peer support, making course materials more accessible, and adopting open educational resources.
Monitoring the data during these changes helps faculty see the impact. Foote recommends getting exit tickets from students, sending out surveys, and other low-lift ways of getting qualitative feedback in order to track progress.
“We can’t rely on our intuition alone to know whether or not something is working,” she says. “We really have to measure the thing — the intervention, the outcomes — and then adjust accordingly.”
Related reading — What Are Evidence-Based Teaching Practices and How Do They Support Digital Learning?
Phase 3: Act and refine
As the course optimization process progresses, institutions then focus on refining those changes based on the data they’ve been collecting.
They may also begin to extend the process to more sections of their gateway courses based on the information they gathered about what works. “I generally advise institutions to start with about 50 percent of their sections,” says Foote. By the third phase, they should be up to 75 to 100 percent of the sections redesigned.
Each phase is meant to last roughly a year, although some institutions move more quickly than others. Foote urges institutions to think about the cumulative effect of small changes over time, rather than rushing to make big, sweeping changes. “There’s something about every course that we teach that could be improved,” she says. “We have to ask what two or three things I can do over time that could lead to a big difference.”
In every phase of the process, Foote recommends getting feedback about course changes from student teaching assistants or previous students, as well as asking students directly in the classroom how things are landing with them.
“It’s important that we get feedback from students not just at the end of the term, but periodically throughout the semester,” says Foote.
Related reading — Transforming Undergraduate STEM Teaching Through Course Design, Faculty Support, and Data
Increasing support, not reducing rigor
Foote says that “in terms of improving student learning and, ultimately, degree completion, you can’t ignore gateway courses,” but sometimes there is resistance from faculty who worry that course optimization means making them easier to pass, which will create problems for students later on.
“Sometimes faculty think gateway course redesign is about reducing rigor,” she says. “But in a lot of instances, faculty can increase rigor because they’ve scaffolded it and built trust with students.”
This is reflected in the Gateway to Completion anthology case studies from the Gardner Institute, as well as in Foote’s own experience as a professor at Kennesaw State University. As a result of redesigning her own courses, she found she was able to garner more trust from her students, more quickly.
“They were willing to come along and do even more advanced things than we had been doing in previous courses,” she says. “We got further, faster.”
Explore more professional development programs from Every Learner’s partners