Minority Performance after a Remedial Mathematics Course

David Tello and Rodrigo Carraminana, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois-Chicago, Chicago, IL, 60607

Our research examines the performance of students who take remedial mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Minority students are over-represented in this pool. African American students perform worse than average, and Latino students perform better than average. Our research suggests that the academic skills classes offered primarily to Latino students help to explain their success in the remedial classes and their subsequent academic performance in the math course sequence. This project analyzed the performance of minority students who successfully completed Elementary Mathematics (Math 070) during the Fall of 1997. Our primary interest was those students who took the next level course, Intermediate Algebra (Math 120), in the Spring of 1998 and subsequently successfully completed a higher level mathematics or mathematics-oriented course for which Math 120 is a prerequisite, depending on student curriculum.

In conclusion, we observed significant differences by ethnic groups in

students’ behavior in these particular courses, which suggests that the ethnic factor should be considered when making studies at UIC. Please, keep in mind that the results shown in this paper are preliminary findings. They should encourage others to conduct more detailed studies on academic retention.