AUM co-requisite math program levels the playing field for student success

Former Auburn University at Montgomery student athlete Brandon Howard exhibited resilience on the court as a college basketball player, never letting a missed shot become a setback or shake his confidence.

Off the court is where Howard faced his toughest challenge — earning an undergraduate degree. Despite years of hard work and persistence, one final hurdle stood between him and graduation, an introductory statistics course. To master it, he would rely on the same resilience that fueled his athletic career, and his life motto to “always finish what you start.”

A growing number of colleges and universities, including AUM, are recognizing the struggles of students like Howard and developing co-requisite math programs to help them find a clearer path to graduation. These innovative course models allow students to enroll in a credit-bearing gateway math course while simultaneously receiving targeted, just-in-time support through a co-requisite math class, either online or in person. The approach is leveling the playing field for students struggling to master college-level math courses.

Since its launch, AUM’s new co-requisite math program has shown promising first-year passing rates, offering renewed hope to current and former students who previously faced challenges with passing traditional math classes. The program’s redesigned courses focus on student success by addressing individual learning needs and offering flexibility, the key that was missing for Howard.

A missed shot becomes motivation

Howard’s academic journey took him from two junior colleges to Alabama State University, before he landed at AUM in Fall 2012 on a basketball scholarship to pursue a degree in psychology. He found support and encouragement from faculty and thrived in his sport, but the one required statistics course stood in his way.

“I tried multiple times, but I just couldn’t get through it,” Howard said.

In Spring 2017, just one class shy of graduating, Howard left AUM without his degree. He shifted gears, building a career as a network engineer and earning Cisco certifications to establish himself in the tech industry. In 2020, he gave college another shot, re-enrolling in the same statistics course — but again, the traditional, in-person format proved to be a barrier.

“You had to be physically there in the classroom, and it just didn’t suit me,” he said. Howard said he struggled with balancing work and family with the in-person statistics course, making it an ongoing challenge.

While Howard stepped away from his academics, a new College of Sciences dean — Douglas Leaman — joined AUM in 2021 and began working with faculty to find new ways to support both current and former students who faced similar challenges with gateway math courses. His approach was to create a more effective, student-centered math remediation model as a pathway for students to earn their degrees with fewer setbacks.

By Fall 2024, Leaman and a team of specially trained faculty members launched AUM’s new co-requisite math initiative.

“The goal of this new math program is to improve student success in college math by eliminating the traditional remediation model,” Leaman said. “Instead of requiring students to take one or more stand-alone remedial math courses before college-level courses, our approach lets them tackle both simultaneously with far better results.”

“National trends and peer institution data consistently show that co-requisite remediation models outperform traditional models, with higher student success and retention rates.”

Co-requisite math’s winning record

Howard represents a success story of using the co-requisite approach. He re-enrolled at AUM in Fall 2024 to complete the statistics course STAT 1070, this time with the support of the new co-requisite math program.

“The entire time I was away from AUM, I kept a close relationship with my psychology professors, like Dr. [Steven] Lobello, who was an excellent mentor and a good friend of mine,” Howard said. “It was a call from Dr. Lobello that changed everything for me and led me to re-enroll at AUM.”

After becoming a student again at age 34, Howard passed the AUM statistics course in one semester, earning a “high B.”

“I walked at graduation last fall with my first bachelor’s degree in psychology,” he said.

AUM is seeing more students achieve success under the new co-requisite math model, said Yi Wang, chair and professor of mathematics at AUM, who now oversees the program.

In the first year of the program, 279 students were enrolled in both a co-requisite math course and a credit-bearing math gateway course, simultaneously. Of those, 71 percent successfully passed the credit-bearing gateway math course on their first try, with 85 percent of those who passed earning a grade of C or better, a sharp improvement from the previous model.

Under the old system, students who traditionally were placed into a remediation math course might spend two semesters just getting through the course before taking a credit-bearing math course, with faculty seeing only 32 percent of them completing the credit-bearing math course with a C or better, Wang said.

“Our new model saves students time and saves students money,” he said.

New playbook for success

Incoming high school students and transfer students, like Howard, are placed in the new co-requisite math program depending on their ACT or ALEKS scores, Wang said. The new model requires faculty teaching co-requisite math courses to use uniform workbooks, group activities with an emphasis on hands-on learning, and weekly quizzes to check students’ progress.

“We want every student to get the best result, which means students work a lot of math problems with their peers under the new co-requisite model,” Wang said. “We want to empower students to start thinking, ‘I can take and pass math just like everybody else.’”

Currently, AUM offers four courses in the co-requisite math program — MATH 1020 (Contemporary Mathematics) MATH 1050 (Applied College Algebra), MATH1120 (Precalculus Algebra) and STAT 1070 (Introduction to Statistics).

Additionally, each semester online co-requisite math courses are offered to cater to working professionals, like Howard, and online students, Wang said.

“We’re also making real-time adjustments to minimize problems, address non-effective approaches, and increase efficiency within the program,” he said.

Until AUM made him aware of the new co-requisite math program, Howard said there was a time he was just trying to figure it all out between his career and completing his degree.

“I was really just at the phase of the game where I wanted to make sure the things that I’m doing are the things I preach to my two sons, which is to always finish what you start,” he said. “My goal is to be a good role model to them.”