Once every five years since 1965, two-year colleges have participated in a survey of collegiate mathematics programs in the U.S. sponsored by the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). CBMS and the Survey Committee especially thanks the two principal collegiate undergraduate mathematics professional organizations for their help in gathering survey data, namely, The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).

Here are some interesting facts about mathematics programs in two-year colleges taken from the CBMS2000 survey which was conducted in fall, 2000. The entire survey will be available in print from the American Mathematical Society (P.O. Box 6248, Providence, R.I., 02940-6248; e-mail ams@ams.org) about April 15, 2002. After about April 15, the reader should be able to access the complete survey document by using the URL "www.cbmsweb.org."

For fall, 2000, the survey was managed by professional statisticians in the survey unit at The University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) who determined a stratified sample of 300 two-year colleges nationwide to receive the survey instrument. Of these, 179 (60%) returned the survey, from which national figures were projected. The CBMS Survey Committee used these projections in its regular five-year report/analysis.

For more information about the survey and its findings as they pertain to two-year colleges, contact Stephen Rodi, Associate Survey Director for Two-Year Colleges, at "srodi@austin.cc.tx.us."

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• Virtually all two-year colleges with mathematics programs offered diagnostic or placement testing. About 98% had a mathematics lab or tutorial center.

• Locally written placement test materials were used in 99% of colleges while commercial tests came from American College Testing (ACT), the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and a variety of other test providers. The first two commercial sources were used, respectively, by 30% and 34% of two-year colleges.

• On a comparative level, in fall 2000 two-year colleges were much more likely than four-year colleges or universities to require placement testing of their entering or first-time students (98% versus 49%) or to enforce mandatory course placement based on the test (67% to 47%). The gap also is large with regard to a required visit with an advisor before enrolling in a mathematics course, 79% at two-year colleges and 60% at four-year colleges.

• In fall 2000, the average section size in two-year college mathematics courses continued the downward trend begun ten years earlier, ending the decade with an average section size of 23.7 students. The average section size in 1995 was 25.5 and in 1990 was 27.8 students.

• The predominant instructional modality continued to be the standard lecture method. However, the graphing calculator was widely used in all courses beginning with College Algebra. For College Algebra, the change from 1995 to 2000 in the percent of course sections using graphing calculators was huge: 38% in 1995 to 74% in 2000.

• The percentage of sections in all three levels of mainstream calculus using group projects and writing components increased , although the rate of increase was not as great as was seen earlier in the reform movement between 1990 and 1995. The use of graphing calculators rose 13 percentage points, 11 percentage points, and 6 percentage points, respectively, in these three courses.

• Fewer than 1% of mathematics class sections were offered via television in 1995 and only 2.5% in 2000 were described as using distance learning. Among high enrollment courses, College Algebra had 6.7% of sections offered via distance learning and Elementary Statistics had 5.8%.

• During the two-academic-year period of 1999-2000 and 2000-2001, 65% of all two-year colleges offered a pre-calculus/elementary functions course, a nearly twenty percentage point increase compared to 1994-1995 and 1995-1996. The percentage of two-year colleges offering a combined college algebra/trigonometry course during that same two-year period almost doubled to 32%.

• About half of two-year colleges offered a special mathematics course for pre-service K-8 teachers in either academic year 1999-2000 or 2000-2001. Fewer than a quarter assigned a faculty member to coordinate pre-service K-8 teacher education.

• In comparison to 1995, in fall 2000 an increasing percentage of two-year colleges, but still no more than 50%, offered specialized courses such as Linear Algebra, Mathematics for Liberal Arts, and Mathematics for Elementary School Teachers.

• In fall 2000, dual enrollment courses--courses often taught on a high school campus by a high school teacher and for which a student received both high school and college credit--made up about 14% (1726 of 11,995) of all college algebra, precalculus, and calculus course sections at two-year colleges. About 61% of two-year college mathematics programs reported full control over the selection of instructors for dual enrollment courses.

• The number of institutions and mathematics programs requiring some form of continuing education or professional development for full-time permanent faculty almost doubled from 20% in 1995 to 38% in 2000.

• In fall, 2000 a traditional mathematics or mathematics/computer science department was found in fewer than half (43%) of the two-year colleges with mathematics programs, and 10% of these were multi-campus departmental arrangements. More common was a division structure, where mathematics program administration was combined with science or other disciplines.

• In 29% of two-year colleges, remedial/developmental mathematics courses were administered separately from the mathematics program. This was almost exactly the same percentage as in 1995.

• For the first time, in fall 2000 essentially all full-time permanent faculty had a computer or terminal in their office, up to 99% from 76% in 1995. On the other hand, there was an 8 percentage point increase in the number of part-time faculty who needed to share a desk with two other people (three or more to a desk), up to 51%.

• More mathematics program heads (62%) classified too much need for remediation as the most important problem faced by their mathematics program. Low student motivation and the need to use too many part-time faculty were second and third.

Summary.

Each academic year, there are almost 3 million enrollments in mathematics courses at two-year colleges. These account for about 46% of all academic year undergraduate collegiate mathematics enrollments.

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The CBMS2000 report contains a section on the ratio of academic year enrollment to fall enrollment for various kinds of schools. In 1995 and earlier, this was taken to be "2." Double the fall to get academic year. There seems to have been a significant change in that regard,

especially for four year schools, in fall, 2000, as a result of almost all schools moving to a semester (rather than quarter) system between 1995 and 2000. The multiplier respectively for academic 1999/2001 as reported in CBMS2000 are:

                                    Four Year School Math Departments: 1.84
                                    Four Year School Stat Departments: 2.18
                                    Two Year School Math Programs: 2.01

The following calculates a mathematics and statistics (but not computer science) total ACADEMIC year enrollment based on the fall, 2000 data, using the multiplier above. It includes mathematics and statistics taught in math departments, statistics taught in statistics departments, and (for two-year colleges) mathematics courses (mostly remedial) taught outside of math programs (e.g., in developmental studies departments). Fall enrollment numbers can be found in the printed CBMS2000 report in Table SE.1, except for the "outside program" enrollment number for two-year colleges which is in Table TYR.15.