An Unexpected Key to Performance in Gateway Math Courses

For many community college students, gateway math courses—required for entry into many programs of study—have functioned more like gatekeeper math courses. These classes, such as Introductory Algebra, Statistics, and Trigonometry, have some of the highest rates of failure among all offerings at two-year schools and are considered one of the biggest barriers to an associate degree and to upward transfer, particularly for Black and Latinx students.

“Students have a lot of trauma around math,” said Dr. Laura Schueller, strategy director for Complete College America. “Students come in with a lot of experiences where they feel like math has been used as a proxy for ‘smart,’ so they bring a lot of baggage into those classes.”

Research on gateway math as a barrier has mostly focused on students—their demographic backgrounds, socioeconomic statuses, and high school grades. But a new study is shining a light on an area that has been largely neglected: the instructors.

To study the elements causing success—or failure—in gateway math courses, a team of researchers at Education Equity Solutions (EES), an organization focused on higher ed policy reform, examined records for over 22,000 students at four California community colleges. The colleges were in different regions and settings, ranged in size from small to large, and had racially diverse student bodies. Using this data, the researchers performed calculations to find out which factors were responsible for differences in student performance.

What they found was striking. Math instructors were the factor most responsible for variance in student outcomes by far. Thirty-four percent of the observed difference was attributable to teachers, more than twice as much as the amount explained by a student’s previous academic preparation (14%). A student’s high school (11%), personal demographics (7%), and the attributes of the course itself (1%) played smaller roles still.

According to Dr. Mina Dadgar, founder and executive director of EES and lead author of the study, what’s making the difference isn’t whether the professor is a strong teacher, at least as skill has been traditionally measured. And an instructor’s age and gender don’t seem to make a difference. (There were too few Black and Latinx teachers to study the impact of race, although research has shown that instructors of color can improve the performance of minoritized students.) Rather, the impact seems to come from a professor’s attitude towards making his or her students comfortable.

Dr. Mina Dadgar, founder and executive director of Education Equity Solutions“The way instructors anticipate and address power dynamics, the way they provide messages of support to students and encourage help-seeking, the way they communicate that everyone, regardless of background, can succeed, all these things matter, especially for Black students, especially for Latin[x] students,” said Dadgar.