Illustrating the Utility of a New Metric to Evaluate Postsecondary Mathematics Placement Policies

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 4:20 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Assessing Equity, Success, and Effectiveness in Higher Education (Table 31)

Abstract

We introduce a new metric – the classification power of a policy - to examine the effectiveness of a post-secondary mathematics placement policy. This metric allows researchers and educators to compare the effectiveness of multiple placement policies that are applied to different student populations and place different percentages of students into a given course. We conceptualize the new metric as a measure of the improvement of the implemented policy over a hypothetical policy that places students by a Bernoulli coin-flip process. We expect an effective policy to perform significantly better than this hypothetical coin-flip placement. We illustrate the utility of this metric by applying this methodology to institutional data at our institution.

Authors

• Kristin Frank, Towson University

• Alexei Kolesnikov, Towson University

• Xiaoyin Wang, Towson University