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Thirty-two percent of high school graduates are not proficient in math when they enter UNM as freshmen, said UNM President Robert Frank.
“They’re not prepared to do college math, so many students go to their math classes and fail,” he said. “And they either get discouraged and leave college, or they put it off for a long time and face challenges later in their curriculum.”
The new Math Learning Lab is the latest measure to improve the UNM students’ preparedness for college-level math. The MaLL, located in the lower level of the Centennial Science and Engineering Library, opened on Friday.
Frank said that although planning for the MaLL had been initiated by the UNM’s math department before 2012, he started to get involved with the process right after he was selected as UNM’s 21st president in January of last year. He said the facility was based on a similar math laboratory in Kent State University, where Frank served as provost and senior vice president before he came to UNM.
Frank said the MaLL, which has 140 computers, is a unique way for students to learn math.
“Our students are learning in a way that they have not learned before,” he said. “It’s personalized, it’s adaptive, and most of all, the success can be phenomenal.”
The MaLL is MATH 120, redesigned. MaLL coordinating instructor Jenny Ross said the course started this semester and is designed to replace in-class lectures with a software called ALEKS, which builds a personalized lesson plan for students. It is a three-credit course, and does not count toward core requirements.
Ross said it is impossible for students to fail MATH 120.
“If they don’t finish by the end of the semester, they just get an incomplete, and they can actually finish it over break … or on the next term” she said. “They don’t have to start all over again.”
Ross said that before starting the course, students take an assessment that determines their individual math proficiency. She said students are not required to do activities they test out of.
“This is more of a self-based class because if they finish early, they’re done with the class. They don’t have to keep coming.”
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