Quantitative Measures for Assessing Learning Centers: An Agenda and Exploration.
The national trend of requiring all college students to engage with tertiary level mathematics has created the need to rethink how students can be supported at this level. Current trends in higher education show a decreased reliance on remedial developmental education courses and expanded reliance on learning centers. It is important to look at student participation and learning in the context of these supportive resources. This research paper explores firstgeneration college student usage of a mathematics learning center at a large Midwestern university and launches a research agenda to explore rigorous analytical methods of understanding the impact of learning centers. Ongoing efforts to increase and broaden college attainment have drawn new attention to services for undergraduates, particularly in their transition to first year studies in STEM courses. A consortium of seven leading higher education organizations recently called for new attention and investment in strategies that help students succeed in challenging lower division courses (Charles A. Dana Center, 2012) Central to this call is decreased reliance on non credit remedial developmental education courses and expanded reliance on second access programs such as Supplemental Instruction (SI) and learning centers. These programs typically involve crossdepartmental collaborations that provide additional access to course content, usually via peer mentoring and tutoring from vetted undergraduate students. For the purpose of this paper, we focus our 110 TLAR, Volume 21, Number 2 efforts on the utilization of tertiary mathematics learning centers. This choice is multi faceted but primarily due to learning centers' proposed viability for centralizing campus resources. Theoretically, these centers provide a robust, campus vetted second access to content to support the initial access gained by students in lecture. Our research group recognizes the widespread literature reporting student difficulties with the transition from secondary mathematics to tertiary mathematics (De Guzman, Hodgson, Robert, Villani, 1998; Gueudet, 2008) We are also invested in the literature that suggests that students largely blame the nature, design, and implementation of the formal mathematics lecture for many of their negative interactions with mathematical content (Yusof Tall, 1998) We find this blame is an oversimplification of a very complex issue but do empathize with students' struggles, as we ourselves have struggled in our own studies of mathematics. We do recognize the formal lecture, in its current form, as problematic, but we do not believe that replacing or reforming the implementation of lecture is the most pragmatic approach to this complex issue. Some factors contributing to students' views of lecture are obvious, namely that lecturers rarely are instructed in practical teaching methodology, and research often takes precedence over lecturing (Mamona Downs Downs, 2008) Other cognitive science factors could contribute to the complexity of scaling the widespread reform to the tertiary lecture, such as mathematicians' content knowledge for teaching (Ball, Thames, Phelps, 2008; Davis Renert, 2013; Freudenthal, 1983) different orientations to the nature of the discipline and teaching of mathematics (Ernest, 1985; Renert Davis, 2010) and mathematicians' perception of the disconnect of Educational Mathematics literature for helping them cope with the work demands of the tertiary lecture (Sfard, 1998) One final note is that decadesold efforts to reform tertiary mathematics lectures have resulted in little consistent, widespread impact on students' experiences with the content (Mamona Downs Downs, 2008) We turn then to learning centers and their culture for supporting cross campus partnerships to scale a university's ability to improve students' interactions with robust mathematical content. Assessing Learning Centers| 111