One of the speakers, Mercedes A. McGowen of William Rainey Harper College, rattled off the following factoids: Pre-calculus enrollment is up in four-year colleges nationwide, and calculus enrollment is down. At two-year colleges, enrollment in remedial math courses such as first-year algebra is up 69%. Zalman Usiskin, whose University of Chicago Mathematics Project has launched alternative textbook series for both secondary and elementary schools, most notably the Everyday Math series, followed with his own facts and some conclusions: American fourth graders and eighth graders had a significant increase in their arithmetic scores since 1973, according to a series of NAEP tests. (Click here for more information.) In addition, all cities had average fourth and eighth grade tests scores roughly equivalent to the third world countries that also participated in the survey. For example, a typical District of Columbia eighth grader scored about as well as a typical fourth grader from North Dakota, which scored the best among the states.
Twelfth graders, by contrast, posted only modest gains in test scores since 1973. Usiskin cited as a possible explanation results from the National Survey of Science and Math Education. 37 percent of SAT-takers will be the first college students in their families. American kids, unlike others around the world, participate in many clubs and sports. Two-thirds of American high school kids have a part-time job, 27% working more than twenty hours a week. 94% of students above geometry rely heavily on a graphing calculator.
18% of high schoolers take calculus, with 5% taking A.P. calculus. Usiskin speculates that these students, even many of the A.P. students, have shaky preparations toward calculus. As a result, students usually stop their math studies with calculus. Usiskin urges that colleges develop a broad-based post-calculus course to keep students taking math.
Finally, Florence S. Gordon of New York Tech presented a startling result from her math department, where there were four sections of a pre-calculus course a year ago. Since the calculus course at New York Tech is a "reform" course, using the Harvard textbook, the math faculty debated whether to teach a reform pre-calc course for the first time. There was no consensus, so two of the sections used the Larson text as part of a traditional pre-calculus course. The other two sections used "Functions in the Real World: A Precalculus Experience" by Gordon et. al. (addison Wesley). The "reform" students had, on average, done worse on the pre-placement test, but they did better on seven of the ten common questions on the pre-calc final. In the subsequent calculus course, 77% of the reform students passed the course, compared to 42% from the traditional course.