We're told to come up with strategies to increase the passing rate.
This may be a valid request, but it's impossible to know without more information. If we take your total pool of students we can probably break them down into 4 groups
1) Intelligent and motivated
2) Intelligent and unmotivated
3) Not intelligent and motivated
4) Not intelligent and not motivated
Nearly all students in 1) should be passing while nearly all students in 4) should be failing. It's the students in groups 2) and 3) where the teacher can really make a difference. This is where teaching styles, more/less work, etc... come into play.
If a large percentage of students from groups 2) and 3) are failing then there may be some teaching issues that need to be addressed. Group 4) simply needs to not be let in the class in the first place.
This semester I'm teaching 8th grade level algebra. At a community college this is typically the second most populated course for the math department. Pre-algebra is the number 1 course. I have two students. Call one of them A and one B.
A is 27 years old, never had algebra in high school and hasn't had math in 10 years. She's going to college because her hands have arthritis and she can't continue to cut hair (her current profession) for much longer. I'm trying to teach her in one semester stuff that took me a year to learn when I was in eighth grade. I told her the class was going to be tough. I told her it would require a lot of effort on her part and that it would be frustrating. Her response was, "Well, I have a life outside of school and work and I'm not going to sacrifice it." I knew then she would fail. She dropped a few weeks ago.
B is Hmong barely speaks English, has 7 kids, a job and never went to school as a child. She's getting an A.
Is A's failure my fault? Is B's success my fault?
My experience is that groups 2, 4 as you label them are a large majority of the students I encounter. I can't force a student to be willing to sit down and do problems. And algebra is a subject that requires you to do problems to get it. If a student isn't motivated there isn't much I can do.
Learning is work. It requires effort. It's frustrating. Students at my college, for the most part, are not willing to go through the frustration, effort, and work necessary to learn. I'm a bad motivator. I've tried to be a better motivator. I believe strongly in the correctness of the Chinese proverb:
A teacher can only open the door to the house of knowledge, he can not make you enter.
This may be a valid request, but it's impossible to know without more information. If we take your total pool of students we can probably break them down into 4 groups
1) Intelligent and motivated 2) Intelligent and unmotivated 3) Not intelligent and motivated 4) Not intelligent and not motivated
Nearly all students in 1) should be passing while nearly all students in 4) should be failing. It's the students in groups 2) and 3) where the teacher can really make a difference. This is where teaching styles, more/less work, etc... come into play.
If a large percentage of students from groups 2) and 3) are failing then there may be some teaching issues that need to be addressed. Group 4) simply needs to not be let in the class in the first place.