Science As The Next Frontier of Corequisite Support

00:00:00 Nichole Mann: Hello and welcome to the CCA on the podcast. My name is Nichole Mann and I serve as the Midwest Region Alliance Engagement Director at Complete College America. Today, I have some great guests here for a conversation on the implications and possibilities of expanding Co-requisite format in the sciences. In 2021, Complete College America released No Room for Doubt, Moving Corequisite Support from Idea to Imperative. Since then, Co-requisite education has been top of mind for many state and institutional leaders throughout the alliance, with institutions seeing the benefit of swapping out cumbersome developmental math and English sequences for co-requisite courses supported by robust student supports to give students the tools they need to be successful in more advanced courses at a lower financial and personal cost. The momentum is growing and that sparked interest in the possibilities to expand this model in new ways. In twenty twenty four, the Ohio Department of Higher Education, in partnership with the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, thirteen community colleges and six public universities launched Ohio Strong Start in Science to transform and scale Co-requisite design and introductory biology, anatomy and physiology and chemistry courses. My guest today are Dr. Thomas Dickson and Geoff Woolf. Doctor Thomas Dickson serves as the director for the Ohio Strong Start in Science Initiative for the Ohio Department of Higher Education, supporting a network of twenty colleges and universities across the state. His background includes over twenty five years of work with advising, career counseling and student affairs services at Arizona State University and University of Arizona, as well as leading student success initiatives and high impact practice programs at University of California, Riverside, where he served as Assistant Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education. Most recently, he worked with Growing Inland Achievement as Director of Postsecondary Initiatives, where he led implementation of the intermediaries for scale initiative funded by the Gates Foundation, and supported institutional transformation efforts of eighteen colleges and universities across Southern California. Tom's education includes a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, a master's of Education and Counseling, and a Doctorate of Education in higher and Post-secondary education. Geoff Woolf has served as Dean of Humanities and Sciences at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College for the past eight years. He moved to the job following seventeen years as a tenured professor of English and Literature and chair of the department. During his time as a faculty member, Geoff was also contract compliance officer and chief negotiator for the Cincinnati State chapter of the American Association of University Professors. One of his first jobs as dean of humanities and sciences was to lead Cincinnati State's original strong start to finish project, accelerating completion of gateway English and math courses, and he now serves as project lead for Strong Start in Science. He's the author of four books of poetry and an experienced mediator. His education includes an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop and an M.S. in Negotiation and Dispute Resolution from Creighton University. Welcome, Tom and Geoff.

00:03:33 Geoff Woolf: Hi. Thanks for having us.

00:03:37 Nichole Mann: So tell us a little bit about yourselves and how Co-requisite education came to be part of your work. Tom, do you want to start?

00:03:45 Thomas Dickson: Sure. My background, as you mentioned, with the very thorough biography, was heavily in academic advising administration. One of my large roles with that was as an assistant dean for nursing. So that connects well with the Stem pathways, especially with biology, chemistry and physiology. As I moved forward, I was working at University of California, Riverside. A wide variety of different undergraduate student success initiatives did a lot of work on first gen early student pathways. Also oversaw the Health Professions Advising unit. So it was doing a lot of work again, working with biology, chemistry and anatomy and physiology. Had done some work with Complete College America, working on time to degree and first and second year student momentum. That ultimately led me over to growing Inland Achievement, where I worked for a few years doing work regionally. Growing Inland Achievement represents San Bernardino and Riverside counties. It's a cradle to career organization that did a lot of higher education intermediary work. I was leading the institutional transformation efforts as part of the Gates Foundation's Intermediaries for scale initiative, along with other partners like Complete College America, Achieving the Dream, Center strong start to finish. Ask you a bunch of other folks as well. I was doing a lot of institutional transformation work. A lot of it turned into a focus on first year and gateway courses. I also did a lot of partnerships and work with the good folks at the Gardner Institute, and did a lot of work with biology and math transfer pathways and curriculum complexity work, trying to improve student transfer between the two, most recently relocated to Ohio. Um, my wife is also a higher education administrator, so followed her out here and started working with Ohio Department of Higher Education in late October of twenty twenty four, which got connected with the Strong Start in Science initiative. It's been a good run so far, and I'm looking forward to seeing how each of the campuses continue to progress.

00:05:47 Geoff Woolf: My background is a lot less complex than Tom's. I've spent my entire adult life in the trenches as an English teacher, and so I started my career at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, teaching both developmental English and English composition as well as literature. When I moved to Cincinnati State. My focus was entirely on composition literature, and I remember as soon as I got here, I attempted to talk to the department about implementing what looked very much like Co-requisite instruction that I had wanted to bring from North Carolina a relatively short time in community college terms, fifteen years to finally bring that Co-requisite course to fruition. It's kind of a story about the uphill battle of some of this work, but it took culture changes. For me, though, it's just been about being with the students in the classroom for such a long time that I saw the opportunities, and when I finally became dean, I was able to sort of move the ball a little more effectively than I ever was as a faculty member.

00:06:57 Nichole Mann: Jeff, I appreciate you mentioning the culture change that comes with Co-requisite supports, because I think that's one of the biggest pieces that lays the foundation with the institutions that I've talked to, that have done this successfully is not just gaining buy in and convincing faculty, but there's nothing wrong with asking some questions, right? For a faculty member to say, is this what's best for my student? So leading that culture change of let's look at why this is best for the student. Let's look at what circumstances make this work and what circumstances will undermine what we're doing. I think that culture change piece is absolutely essential, and that's why I was so excited to learn more about the type of work that Tom is doing. With strong start to finish and the work that both of us have done on the intermediaries for scale project is all tied around that culture change, and having a real conversation about what makes this work for us. So I was glad that you brought that up right out the gate.

00:08:02 Geoff Woolf: Well, if you don't mind, I guess I would jump in, because spending my whole life as faculty, I spent a lot of time hearing people ask me that question is this best for the student? And what I realized was, that's a really good way to get faculties back up over an issue. Is this what's best for the student? Sort of includes that supposition that I have a better idea for the student. And I think one of the ways that we moved culture a little bit here was not by putting it in terms of a value judgment like that, but by putting it in terms of are there other ways to do this that might get us different outcomes? And if you take a sort of research and development approach rather than a values based approach. I have found that it's easier to get buy in to say, let's see what happens if we try some other things, and then make the judgment about whether the new thing is better or best or worse.

00:09:05 Nichole Mann: Figuring out the how, though, that's the tricky part, right? Right. And luckily with science, we have some background. We know a little bit about Co-requisite and how it works and what different ways of approaching it might look like. So what excites you all about science as the next iteration of Co-requisite education?

00:09:29 Thomas Dickson: I mean, for me, it's seeing what places have done in the past around math and English has been a fairly successful model in many places. I mean, every place has their own context and their own results, but it's overarchingly. There has been a great deal of success in math and English, and having done so much work with nursing and health professions advising, I saw just how aggressive the Stem fields can be. Around Non-completion rates around student success, students sequencing of courses and their time to degree can be a huge challenge. One of my campuses. If you didn't take, say, bio one your first term and you had to take some sort of developmental course prior to that, you really weren't taking bio one until fall of your sophomore year because it was only offered in that one term. And so the sequencing can put you behind right out the gate. Also, you know, a lot of places use courses as weed out courses rather than as something about supporting students and being helping with student success. There's still a mentality that you have to find a way to reduce numbers or get rid of those who can't hack it. Rather than try to figure out how to support more students to be able to perform at the level needed for the profession and for the discipline. And I think also, you know, the ghost policies and processes that are out there. There are so many processes, policies and individuals who are giving out all sorts of information that is not beneficial to student success, and they're often being used in a way that is making fewer students be able to navigate and push forward through toward their goals. So anything that will help make it more for student success, I'm all about that.

00:11:27 Geoff Woolf: For me, it's about finishing the job of the original Strong Start, which was focused on math and English, and there are knock on effects of the things that we've done in deleting all of our developmental English and severely reducing our developmental mathematics, as well as implementing multiple measures for placement that they're necessary changes that need to be considered in other humanities courses. Once English is paced differently, or once students enter their Gateway English course at a slightly different level, the math and science connection is very similar. When we move to a Co-requisite model and when we move to multiple measures for placement, the math or the science departments had a reasonable concern that there were going to be things that the students would be missing coming into their courses that we sometimes had answers for and sometimes didn't have answers for. And this is an opportunity to really take a hard look at what the downstream effect of the math changes are to the science courses and to start patching those gaps if they exist, or to start shoring up the relationship between math and science curricula. So to me, it's all part of one job that was already started. And it gives us a chance to finish.

00:12:59 Nichole Mann: It ties right into what excites me about this possibility is, you know, in a past life, I was a nursing advisor, and seeing the way that anatomy and physiology served as that make or break point where it could keep you out of the program, it could slow you down to the point that the ability to retain that student was severely reduced. But also, if a student just eked through it and figured it out, then that impacted their success going forward, that it wasn't just about finishing the class, getting the grade. It was really deeply about getting the content in a way that other classes might not be. When a nursing student takes an a first level English class, for example, what they write their papers on doesn't matter that much. It's about gaining the skill. But in anatomy and physiology, it was about gaining that specific knowledge. And if they were starting at a deficit, they were going to stay behind. And that was something I really struggled with as an advisor. Another thing I saw was a lack of tutoring supports for those classes that they just weren't available. There wasn't somebody who could tutor for that because it was more specific. So I think this is a really exciting iteration of the work that's already happened. But what concerns and challenges have you been hearing about or running into?

00:14:37 Thomas Dickson: For me, I would say, you know, Theo is always the standard's resources, resources, resources. Everybody always wants to know what are the resources to be able to create, to maintain and sustain beyond the life of any sort of grant that is like ours, that is funding this. But beyond those, you know, there's always questions and concerns about workloads and balancing those workloads and whether or not there's resources to help offset those workloads. But for specifically around Corequisites, there's a lot of questions and concerns around credit versus non-credit bearing co-requisite courses, standalone courses versus embedding the content in existing course structures. The fun part about Stem is that you end up with lecture lab and sometimes also recitations. And so with those three different types of models, some institutions pair lecture and lab together and have a separate recitation, some pair recitation and lab together and have a standalone lab. Some have all three as standalone. And so all these different combinations and permutations, the different varieties of courses that play into it. You know, sometimes there's anatomy and physiology for health science majors, but then there might be anatomy and physiology for engineering. And then there might be anatomy and physiology for another discipline, or chemistry for engineering and chemistry for health sciences and chemistry for another discipline. There's so many different avenues depending on the size of the institution. There's lots of questions around placement. Uh, how do you go about placement? What are the effective and appropriate models for looking at placement? Uh, a lot of places look at standardized test scores, entrance exams. Some try to create in-house models of exams, some use pre-built ones. Others will look at things like high school performance in terms of high school GPA, high school math and science grades, how recent math and science grades were taken. But one of the things we've run into quite heavily is our community colleges really do not, um, for the most part, do not collect a lot of high school data. They will collect student information in order to get them started at the institution. But the way the campus policies play out, they don't need to break down everything that was on the student's high school. Transcript. And so ultimately, the admissions and processing units don't actually break down all of those courses into a data system that you can actually look at that. So you can't go back and look and see how was student performance based off of, you know, high school math grades? You can't look at that data because it just literally doesn't exist. And it has never been put into the system. And it would actually cost huge amounts of resources in terms of personnel as well as technological systems, to be able to load that data into the systems. One of my personal points of frustration is places that have very, very, very late drop policies. So policies where you can drop up until the last day of class. Those skew results so wildly in terms of student course completion, in terms of withdrawal rates, in terms of repeat data. And so you end up seeing a lot of scenarios where the student literally doesn't show up as having ever taken the course, but it might be their second or third attempt because they have dropped it having gone a certain distance, or if they've taken lecture and lab, they might pass the lab, but drop the lecture and then retake the lecture the next time around in order to master the content in a way that they can move forward. So sometimes that can really throw off completion data and our standardized reporting methods for different types of student performance, things that you think should go very quickly when you're working with nineteen to twenty different institutions, with nineteen different processes for how they will process a grant or process an award or process, some element can be extremely difficult to manage. You know, like anything, communication. A lot of our faculty who are participating in this project expressed trying to have opportunities to communicate outside of our Convenings. We do a couple of large convenings with biology faculty and a couple with our chemistry faculty every year, both virtual and in person. But they wanted other ways of connecting above and beyond that. One of the things that we've done is trying to find digital repositories so that they can post information, post questions to each other, post data and exemplars, post research that they've come up with around different things like placement reviews. And one of those big ones was we actually created our own subgroup for small and rural campuses because they were coming up with one of their challenges quite heavily was around dual enrollment and low, low enrollment impacts. And so when some of our campuses have eighty five percent dual enrollment students, the remaining students who are not dual enrollments, uh, are so few that you can't have a standalone Co-requisite course, because you literally have one section. And those that are actually not dual enrollment might be five or six students. And so you can't have a co-requisite standalone class for one student or two students. Uh, it's just not feasible. So there's a lot of logistics that were involved with our small and rural campuses. And so we actually created a small and rural cohort of about six of the institutions that have actually been meeting about every other month, getting together and chatting through different issues that impact those communities specifically.

00:20:27 Geoff Woolf: My resource issues, Is probably much more mundane than what Tom's talking about, and that's something as simple as inventory management. So if you think about increasing the throughput in English courses by reducing developmental English, the resources needed to run English classes are very different. The human resources are somewhat easier to put on the ground for students. But if you take a course like Anatomy and Physiology, where we already show completion rates as high as ninety percent and completely full classes and not enough faculty to put more sections in the schedule, it's sometimes difficult to make the case that we can even handle the increased throughput that accelerating science will create. The same is true of chemistry, where in both of these areas you're constrained by lab space, you're constrained by credentialed faculty. And so could we increase throughput in both of these areas? Yes. Do we have the resources, either physical or human, to to cover that throughput? Right now it's hard to make the case. And again, when you have a department like biology that's showing really strong success under the current model, advocating for change to that is sometimes a difficult case to make.

00:22:06 Nichole Mann: It's an interesting point that sometimes more student success becomes a good problem that we look at. Well, things are going pretty well. Is even better possible and worth it, Even though we know that as institutions, we value success for all students. Jeff, you talked earlier a little bit about data and using a research approach to get faculty on board. I'm curious about what kind of information and data you think would be useful as faculty. Think about their role in Corequisites and the conversation around when and how to do co-requisite science with the understanding that you can't speak for all faculty everywhere, just based on your observations and experiences.

00:23:05 Geoff Woolf: So as I was preparing for this talk today, I was looking at some disaggregated data for our math and English project. And one of the things that actually surprised me was that one of the biggest improvements that we saw in first year completion of Gateway Math and English was among our eighteen and nineteen year old students. This is interesting to me because what it meant was that we were taking a lot of students directly from high school and putting them into developmental courses, when clearly they did not need to be in developmental courses. And similarly, we take a look at high school transcripts and high school grades, and often make the same judgments about placing high school students who might have had challenged high school careers or challenged school districts where it's easy to look at those transcripts and say, well, let's put them in a wait queue, let's put them in the equivalent of a developmental math or science course and slow down their progress a little bit. And of course, that's a lost point for our students. The more developmental education they're in, the more likely they are to not persist or retain. And so I think that one of the things that we can help faculty to see is that we might be underestimating students, and we might be losing them as a result of that. The group that I did not expect to see that big change from was the students directly out of high school. And again, based on the data that we have, like Tom says, it's difficult to really see clearly what they did in high school and how they did in high school. And so starting from a premise that they can always do more than we might initially think they can do is, I think, a positive and affirming message. But it's a big change to the way we think about placement in these courses.

00:25:11 Nichole Mann: I feel like that's the core of Co-requisite. Education is asking the question, what if students could do more than we think they can. Or what if they could do more with less than we expect them to? I think asking that question drives this whole thing. So that's interesting that you brought that up.

00:25:38 Geoff Woolf: And in our experience, that's exactly the issue with math and English is if you set the bar low, they'll achieve low. And frankly, the higher you set the bar, the more likely they are to rise up to that level. And that's been the mistake of the developmental model up to this point is you ask less and you get less.

00:26:01 Nichole Mann: And student success work in general, there's been a move towards strengths based approaches, and this is an area where we really see that showing up from a curricular perspective is looking at curriculum and curriculum design from a strengths based approach. So what do you wish that other people knew about Co-requisite science or Co-requisite courses in general?

00:26:36 Geoff Woolf: Boy, that's a difficult question since we're still in the development process. I think one of the things I wish people knew was that often in the sciences, the gaps that you need to fill with co-requisite instruction or any type of just in time instruction in our situation, for example, what are the gaps that they are not filling by coming into science classes with less math instruction? You know, an example is that what we learn from chemistry was really the one issue that was keeping them in college math or college algebra as a prerequisite for chemistry was logarithms. It was the only thing. And so when we sort of inventoried what students might not be getting in time for their chemistry instruction, it was logs. And so finding ways to address that gap in the chemistry courses was really a much smaller job than trying to look at a holistic problem. They don't have college algebra. Well, the entirety of college algebra is a lot. You don't need all of that necessarily for every chemistry course. And I think that would be the one thing that we've learned through all of our Co-requisite instruction is that you're not looking at holistic gaps in the entire student. You're looking at targeted, specific gaps in their knowledge or in their practice or in their skills. And once you target those through Co-requisite instruction, it doesn't take quite as long as people think it will. It doesn't certainly take a full semester of five hour course.

00:28:36 Thomas Dickson: For me, I would say it's a lot of the understanding, the differences between co-requisite and recitation and co-requisite and supplemental instruction. A lot of people kind of lump them all in together. But traditionally speaking, there are distinct differences between them. Trying to think about Co-requisite as more than just being a first year success type course. It can be embedded tutoring, linked tutoring, peer mentoring, supports a variety of learning strategies, workshops, all sorts of specialized and targeted interventions just in time adjustments to the course and remediation while you're actively working in the course, and ultimately, the coordination between the curriculum side with the faculty and the support side of what other supports you're layering on recitations and supplemental instruction may be part of your co-requisite support strategy, but ultimately they themselves are not co-requisite support corequisites per se. And I would say, ultimately, that there's no one model that is perfect that everybody has to figure out their campus context, their campus environment, and all of them have repercussions. All of them have different methods for supporting students. I am always a big fan of opt out models, where you get more engagement and you get more people getting the supports versus opt in. I used to supervise a wide variety of advising offices, but also the Academic Resource Center at UC Riverside, and you see the rates of utilization of the tutoring and academic support services are exceptionally low by students. Often they're linked with a bad midterm performance. They're not linked with going in before they need the supports. And so anytime that you can kind of get more students engaged and have this be part of the experience, not something they have to go out of their way to add on. Most students don't have that extra time in their lives, and nor do they think of it as being something that they need to do. They think they're in college. We should be able to perform at a college level. It does take a bit of self-awareness, but also takes a little bit of bravery to be able to say, I need these supports and to be able to ask for help. We're seeing a lot of different models. We're seeing standalone corequisites, we're seeing standalone for credit, standalone not for credit. We're seeing paired with learning communities. We're seeing it paired with embedded tutoring or with peer mentoring programs. We're seeing it embedded into lectures and labs. We're seeing people take their recitations and essentially rework how those operate entirely, but often still calling it a recitation, because then they don't have to put through a whole new course proposal, which may take even longer than just auditing and editing the content of a recitation and still keeping it on the books. Plus, then it also messes with other curriculum impacts like transfer agreements and all sorts of other components. So we're seeing lots of different models at every different institution. And I think every institution just has to figure out what works best for them. But to play out those scenarios.

00:31:55 Geoff Woolf: And just to jump in on on Tom's idea about an opt in model, one of the other things that I wish people knew, and maybe on the academic side, valued a little bit more, is that when you move to co-requisite instruction, when you move to things like multiple measures. It changes the advising conversation a great deal. And it changes the way advisors need to be trained. It changes the worldview that they need to come from, regardless of the scores, regardless of what the transcript says, that conversation with the student to help them decide whether they should opt in and whether they should opt out. And to make those decisions that will work in coordination with the curriculum or the supports that you've provided, it really does change that conversation. From the front door.

00:32:48 Nichole Mann: Thing I'm hearing as an overall theme is moving parts, that there are so many moving parts to these things. And I'm curious because we've all worked with people from different areas of institutions, different types of stakeholders, including students. I'm thinking about how we can empower different ranges of stakeholders to really not just understand and buy in, but to leverage the benefits of co-requisite science. I'm really curious about that and what that looks like from us at the nonprofit or support organization level from you, Tom, at the state level, and from you, Jeff, at the campus level.

00:33:40 Thomas Dickson: I would say for me, at the state level, a lot of it is about being as clear as possible, with goals, with purpose, with methods, getting resources to folks wherever we can, trying to help seek out resources for others as much as we can. Listening to what each campus is dealing with, and trying to work with them to identify what supports they may need. Because I may have an idea, but ultimately that campus is going to understand their context much better than I will, and I think a lot of it is helping to provide professional development and training around the different concepts around Co-requisite design. And then one of my personal favorites, reducing sludge, reducing the extraneous efforts that you require of people, very busy administrators and faculty who are taking even more time to rework courses that are very complex, with lots of moving parts that have often taken years and years to refine the existing models. And you're asking them to mess around with that. And anytime you're asking people to make those kind of changes, that's sometimes a very hard ask. And so trying to demonstrate why it's helpful, but also providing the right supports. So that way you're not taking away their valuable time. Anytime I can, you know pre fill out a form for people. You know I'm all about that. Anytime I can cut a survey down from ten questions down to three questions. I'm all about going that route, because ultimately that's going to give those that I'm working with more time to be able to work on the core of what they need to do, where they are specialists.

00:35:20 Geoff Woolf: On the campus level, I try to spend as much time not asking people to do things, but presenting them the problem and asking them if there's anything that they want to try in an attempt to address that problem, or whether they see it as a problem at all. And for me, getting buy in is about being patient with as much experimentation as it might take to get to the right model for your campus. As Tom said, it's different for every campus, whether it ends up being recitation or supplemental instruction or co-requisite or coordination with your learning centers. I think that administrators need to be patient. And one of the things that I think we sometimes do is give up too quickly on something that we're experimenting with. If we don't get immediate success, rather than try to work that attempt a little bit more, we move to the next idea or give up. I think allowing interested faculty members to try anything they want within reason. Anything that your systems will allow or that you can justify, is really the way we ended up solving some of our problems. We didn't rule anything out as a method for addressing the issue, and we listened to all ideas, and we let as many people try as many things as they wanted to come up with our approaches.

00:36:54 Thomas Dickson: And I love that you mentioned that the idea that you're really having folks address the issue of being additive. We add so many things in higher ed. Here's another program, here's another support, Here's another thing that we often don't sit back and look at. Well, what are we doing now? How are we doing it? Is it working? What's not working? How do we edit and adjust what we're doing, rather than just trying to create another niche program to try to address an issue? Whatever we can do to go back and audit and remove some of those steps for people is always exceedingly.

00:37:26 Geoff Woolf: And that was the great thing about the first Strong Start project, is it gave us an excuse to try anything that we wanted. We didn't have to necessarily explain ourselves. It was all under an umbrella that we could justify. We are trying these things as part of a concerted state effort to do good for the student. That's nice to have that umbrella to work under. Everyone working in this sector has something that they've wanted to try with their students, and maybe not enough time or the resources to do it. It provides exactly that opportunity and cover to do some of the stranger things that you might have wanted to attempt up to this point.

00:38:09 Nichole Mann: A national organization like CC, we talk about being impatient reformers. We want to find the thing that works and scale it up. But one thing I've learned in my time with CC is that our approach very much assumes that when we scale it up, it's going to look different everywhere, and really taking the time to get to know the campuses that are looking at implementing these reforms is such an important piece of it, because we can't say, here's the playbook, go run and expect to get the same results everywhere. Here's what we know about what this has looked like in other places. Now let's talk. Let's figure out what are the weird things you've wanted to try. Who on your campus is really excited about the outcomes that are showing up in other places for this, because they've already thought about what this might look like here and what might work here, and what probably wouldn't be a fit in our context, but has some potential if we make these tweaks because you're the experts on your campuses, you know the students, you know the faculty, you know the staff, you know the capacity. And like Tom said, you know what? Things just are not going to happen brand new. But we could build on something that's already working.

00:39:37 Geoff Woolf: Well, even when we scale quickly. I'm trying to remember a CCRC presentation on the recursive nature of guided pathways implementation, and we seem to all have a lot of patients with understanding how much adjustment and change needs to be done as we implement pathways on our campuses. This is exactly the same thing, but it's got even more voices involved in the decision making and the implementation. And so scaling up, when you see something that's happening that is really working is great, but you also have to remember that that's not going to be the end, that all of these things are going to end up being recursive. And that's a good thing. Not a bad thing.

00:40:23 Nichole Mann: Yes, that patience, but persistence that we know it's going to take time. So stay the course. Keep pushing. Keep asking questions. Keep pulling data. Constant evaluation. It doesn't sound fun, but that's kind of the fun part, right?

00:40:41 Thomas Dickson: Absolutely.

00:40:43 Nichole Mann: So if someone wanted to get started with science Carex at their institutions, if they think this sounds like it could be fun, could be something that's a good fit for them and their students, but they're starting from nothing and doing this by themselves. What are the first two or three things that they should consider doing to set themselves up to get the benefit of this type of initiative?

00:41:10 Thomas Dickson: Yeah, I would say, you know, for of course, pull the models, pull the resources, pull the playbooks, pull the exemplars that are out there already to kind of get at your, your mind wrapped around all of the different complexities of what it is that you might be trying to tackle. Diving into surveying your campus personnel, your faculty, your students, your staff, asking them about what is everything looking like? Where do you see the roadblocks? Where do you see issues? Where do you see room for supports? Where do you see opportunities for creating new things? You can also ask them about policies and procedures and placement. Talk to faculty, advising and orientation. Are there potentially ghost processes that are out there that you didn't even know about? Are certain people advising or guiding people down a path that doesn't actually align with what your curriculum actually says? Does your curriculum actually align with what's really happening for students? There may be a lot of well-intentioned folks out there giving out some awkward advice that may not be best for student success. You need to pull data, data, data data, as you've already mentioned, find those broad strokes of completion and non-completion for gateway courses. Find out which ones are mandatory for degree completion and part of key course sequencing for different degrees. Look at your time to degree rates. Look at the courses with the highest DFW rates. Break it down by different subgroups, by different placements, by different majors, by high school scores, by placement test scores, by prior course performance. Once you have identified a course, look at the in course data. Look at how students are performing inside a course. Look at those struggle points. Is it before or after certain lessons and certain exams? Are you using summative or formative models? Is it after midterms? Are they getting other supports? Are they struggling in the lecture but not in the lab? Or are they being successful in the labs but not in the lectures? Where could you potentially create more supports within a course to be able to make it more fluid for a student and to make sure that more students complete it? But a lot of it comes down to data. Data, data, you know, pull your data, find those historic trends. Not all of it is indicative of every student that you are going to be working with. So a lot of times, you need to think of models that are going to help the majority of students perform well and have other supports to address those that may have other struggles in need, other supports, as they're going along the way.

00:43:52 Geoff Woolf: I think the interrogation of the curriculum becomes really important. And that question, in every situation where we have a gatekeeper situation of some sort or another, we ask ourselves why, why, why, why, and what's the why underlying every other? Why for why this thing exists the way it does. We need to actually think about why the curriculum is built the way it is, or why it was built the way it was. In some cases, we're dealing with decades old understandings of how curriculum should work. And when we start actually inventorying the skills and aptitudes that we're expecting for students and courses, what we find is that often these gatekeeping pieces of our curriculum are doing things that they might not need to do in order for the student to be successful, or they're doing too much of it for the student to actually progress. And so we need to look for those moments where we're either duplicating or creating unnecessary slowdowns for students who maybe could succeed with a different model. Why are we doing this? Why are we doing this should always be at the top of our minds.

00:45:26 Nichole Mann: Well, with that, I want to thank both of our guests today. And I also want to thank you, listeners for joining us today on this episode on the present and future state of Co-requisite science education.