Indian River State College (IRSC), a community college in Florida, created a new approach to help minority and low-income students overcome the math barrier for entry into selective enrollment programs across the country.
The program, titled Redesigning Math: The Nuclear Case Study,was published in December 2016 and focused on a cohort of 12 students with a math deficiency, and studied underserved African American populations over the course of one semester. Five of the 12 students, or 40 percent were African American.
Kevin Cooper, the Dean of Advanced Technology at IRSC and the Primary Investigator of Regional Center for Nuclear Education and Training (RCNET), a National Science Foundation ATE Center, said students were chosen to be in the cohort if they needed remedial math and were not ready for intermediate algebra or had failed intermediate algebra in the past.
To make the program applicable to a field which requires a level of numeracy and literacy before enrollment, researchers from RCNET chose to look at the nuclear radiation protection technician track, which is offered at 40 community colleges across the nation. Cooper said the 40 community colleges first heard about this new approach through “direct contact, presentations at national conferences” and “a paper distributed to hundreds of colleges.”
“The common similarities [between IRSC’s program to the other institutions] was the industry interaction, making them understand the context and importance of the math, embedding the math in the classes with real nuclear examples, and the constant monitoring,” Cooper said in an email interview with Diverse.
Radiation protection technicians are required to understand radioactive decay and half-life (exponentials and logarithms) and radioactive distance (inverse square law), which is the college equivalent to intermediate and college algebra classes.
The study noted that nuclear technicians account “for over 2.6 million jobs and $120 billion towards the United States GDP” and by 2030 will “have over 65,000 high-paying nuclear career opportunities.”
