Recommendations May Not Go Far Enough

Carnegie Senior Managing Partner Bernadine Chuck Fong served as a member of the American Association of Community Colleges 21st-Century Commission that released a report last week urging community colleges to change their practices in order to meet the needs of the future. “The report pushes community colleges in the right direction if they are bold enough to truly re-imagine how to implement their mission, but I think colleges can aspire to even higher aims,” Fong said. For example, the report recommends having a goal to increase completion rates by 50 percent by 2020. “I think we can do better than a 50 percent completion rate and accomplish it before 2020,” Fong said.

Carnegie is working to increase the success rate of students in development math, which is one of the greatest gatekeepers to college completion. Statway™, one of Carnegie’s new math pathways, aims to get students to and through a transferable college-level math course in one year. Across the Carnegie network of 19 community colleges, almost 1200 students enrolled in Statway™ last fall, and 68 percent of them passed the first term with a C or better; 75 percent passed with a D or better. “Getting students to success takes attention, but we have already demonstrated that we can do it,” Fong said.

As outlined in a nice article in Inside Higher Ed, the commission’s seven final recommendations fall under three categories:

Redesign students’ educational experiences:
Increase completion rates to 50 percent by 2020 while preserving access.
Dramatically improve college readiness.
Close the skills gap by focusing career and technical education on job preparation.

Reinvent institutional roles:
Refocus the community college mission to meet 21st-century education and employment needs.
Invest in collaboration between community colleges and with partners among philanthropic organizations, government and the private sector.

Reset the system:
Target public and private investments strategically to create new incentives for colleges and students.
Encourage rigor, transparency, and accountability.

Also on the Commission with Carnegie ties were Carnegie Board members Kati Haycock, president of The Education Trust, and Austin Community College District President Richard Rhodes.

Early Results

Those of you in the Carnegie Network already have this news from Statway™ Director Karon Klipple, but it deserves to be shared further because it reinforces that we are indeed on the right track. She reported that 88% of students who passed the first term of Statway™ with a C or better have enrolled in the second term and will earn college credit with its successful completion. This is considerably more than the 25% of students (with C or better) who enrolled in a second term of math studies for college credit in our NIC colleges prior to Statway’s™ launch. If our pass rate remains the same for the second term, and 68% of those students pass the second term, then we will have achieved a success rate of 42%. Currently, among the 19 Statway™ colleges, only 12% of students who are placed into developmental mathematics complete a college-level math course in two years. Stay tuned for final results on the first year when they are available this summer.

Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere

Developmental education is a dead end for the nearly two million students who enroll in remedial courses every year, says a report released recently by Complete College America. The report, “Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere,” says that less than one in 10 students enrolled at a community college graduate within three years, and just a little more than a third complete a bachelor’s degree in six years. However, the report says, the one-third to one-half of academically unprepared students could succeed in college-level courses if their remedial coursework were provided more as a “co-requisite” rather than a prerequisite to their full-credit classes. This information is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Reforms with Promise

Carnegie President Anthony Bryk and Senior Fellow Thomas Toch write in Inside Higher Ed: With the support of five national philanthropies, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has launched a national network of 27 community colleges and three universities dedicated to helping students at the greatest risk of failure in math. The approach uses a comprehensive strategy of support for students and faculty members in a “networked improvement community.”

The network’s early results are promising, even with a largely high-risk student population. Nearly half the students in network colleges are from households with incomes below $40,000 a year. And only 10 percent have mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree. Yet 89 percent remained enrolled for the full fall term (the program rolled out in the network’s colleges at the beginning of the 2011-12 school year) and 68 percent finished the first semester with a grade of C or better (required for college credit), nearly double the 36 percent of students earning the same grades in the less-demanding courses taught previously in the network’s schools.

The students who completed the new courses scored nearly as high on an independent end-of-semester exam as a national sample of community college and university students who had completed college-level statistics coursework. And 88 percent of the students earning C’s or better moved on to the second half of the two-semester, credit-yielding course. That’s more than triple the proportion of students in the network’s colleges who successfully navigated a first term of remedial math and signed up for a second before the network’s creation.

Carnegie in the News

Check out the Carnegie articles in two AMATYC publications. The first is “Lesson Study the Carnegie Way: Sharing Ideas for Continuous Improvement” in the April issue of AMATYC News.
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The second, “Reclaiming the Mathematical Lives of Community College Students,” is in the newsletter for the Developmental Committee of AMATYC.
Read more …

There was also an article on Statway™ in Ed Source’s Extra newsletter, “New Statistics Course Aims to Accelerate College Students’ Path to Success,” that focuses on Carnegie’s work in California and quotes Director Karon Klipple.
Read more …

Lesson Study the Carnegie Way: Sharing Ideas for Continuous Improvement

Carnegie’s Lesson Study provides a framework for faculty members who are part of a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to be involved in continuously improving the Foundation’s two mathematics pathways—Quantway™ and Statway™ — from curriculum development to implementation in the classroom.

The specific goal of a Lesson Study cycle may be any of the following:

• To test a lesson as written, identifying problems that are either specific to that lesson or that may cut across lessons, and hypothesizing improvements in the materials and/or their implementation that might enhance learning opportunities for students;
• To design and test a change, in either the materials or the implementation; and
• To work on a general problem that cuts across specific lessons and that the community sees as a high priority.

Michelle Brock, one of Carnegie’s Lesson Study Handbook authors and Statway™ faculty member from American River College in Sacramento, said Lesson Study is a way to get a lot done with one tool. “The instructors concentrate both on what the students are able to do and on what our role is in making that happen,” she explains. “It forces you to narrow your focus into seeing that one thing that is either supporting or denying the students’ understanding.”

The Carnegie Lesson Study protocol that Brock and others created has been piloted with faculty teams in the NICs and will go into a wider trial later this year. By participating in Lesson Study, the team members will work together to plan instruction, observe each other teaching, and identify the most difficult and high-priority obstacles that stand in the way of success of the pathways.

As Julie Phelps of Valencia Community College noted, “Teaching is a lonely job, and it is really great to have others watch and experience what is going on in my classroom to help inform us all on how to improve our methods to have better student engagement.”

The general goals are to:

• Improve the Statway™ or Quantway™  instructional program (both the materials and the implementation);
• Improve instructors’ own knowledge and skills for implementing the program; and
• Develop a professional community focused on improvement.

Lesson study is fundamentally a research and development process. A core focus of the work is to analyze the program in cause-effect terms, generating and testing hypotheses about how the instructional activities are processed and interpreted by students; how students develop content knowledge based on their instructional experiences; and how changes might be expected to improve students’ learning. In other words, Carnegie is involving its NIC faculty members to improve the materials and the pedagogy.

Brock said that being involved in Lesson Study improved her preparation for class. “I thought I was pretty good before, but being involved forced me to ask the harder questions about how what I did in class impacted student learning.”

She added that Lesson Study is not just one more activity piled onto a faculty member’s already heavy workload. “I appreciate that it does take more time, but the payoff is worth it. We get another perspective and get to see what others are doing.”

Brock said that participating in Lesson Study was part of her commitment to being in collaboration with other faculty members in the co-development of Statway™. “I believe in Carnegie’s vision that Statway™ has the possibility of netting amazing results for student success in developmental mathematics and those of us involved in this initiative from the beginning were committed to going beyond the ‘what’s in it for me’ thinking.”

Carnegie Lesson Study groups are most commonly site-based (at the college); they include from two to six members; and are facilitated by one of its members. The group organizes its work around Lesson Study cycles, usually a minimum of two cycles per year. Each Lesson Study cycle takes from five to eight hours of faculty time, plus an extra two to three hours of the facilitator’s time. It is expected that time spent on Lesson Study will reduce, at least partly, the time faculty would need to spend preparing to teach the program.

A Lesson Study cycle often focuses on a single lesson, and sometimes even a specific part of a lesson.

The findings of site-based Lesson Study groups are shared with other Lesson Study groups working on similar lessons, changes, or problems. Carnegie also anticipates cross-site groups working virtually on common problems.

It is this sharing component that Janet Zupkus of Naugatuck Valley Community College in Connecticut and another contributor to the Handbook, finds most helpful. “Our faculty group is very good at collaborating and sharing results, informally.  We meet weekly for an hour and discuss what went well and what didn’t and share all supplementary materials. Through conversations at the Carnegie Winter Institute, we found that other colleges are not meeting regularly, so the Lesson Study process will hopefully initiate that process and allow them to see the value in meeting regularly, especially with the new curriculum. The other benefit for the formal process is now we will get feedback from all the other participants, not just our own college members.”

No matter what the goal, an important element of Lesson Study is to produce a report in which the group’s inquiry and findings are shared with the Networked Improvement Community. With groups working on improving a common instructional program within a common improvement framework and on common problems encountered when implementing the program, it’s expected that these reports can provide a foundation for continuous improvement of the NIC.

Carnegie at Achieving the Dream

Carnegie Fellow David Yeager presented on Productive Persistence during the Achieving the Dream D.R.E.A.M. conference in Dallas this week. As you can see from the turn out, this is a subject that those working to improve student success in community college want to hear more about. You can watch a video of David presenting to Carnegie’s Winter Institute here … .

Too Many Students in Remedial Classes?

Two new studies from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College found that more community college students are in remedial education classes than need be. The studies found that more than a quarter of the students assigned to remedial classes based on placement test scores could have passed college-level courses with a grade of B or higher. You can access the studies below.

Predicting Success in College: The Importance of Placement Tests and High School Transcripts
By: Clive Belfield & Peter Crosta—February 2012

This paper uses student-level data from a statewide community college system to examine the validity of placement tests and high school information in predicting course grades and college performance. The authors find that while commonly used placement tests do not yield strong predictions of how students will perform in college, high school GPA has a strong association with college GPA and with college credit accumulation.
Learn more …

Do High-Stakes Placement Exams Predict College Success? (CCRC Working Paper No. 41)
By: Judith Scott-Clayton—February 2012

This paper analyzes one of the most commonly used placement exams, using data on over 42,000 first-time entrants to a large, urban community college system. Using both traditional correlation coefficients and decision-theoretic measures of placement accuracy and error rates, the author finds that placement exams are more predictive of success in math than in English, and more predictive of who is likely to do well in college-level coursework than of who is likely to fail.
Learn more …

The Cutting Edge Series: New Ways to Help Community Colleges Help Students Succeed

Achieving the Dream has published a series designed to provide solutions to community colleges as they work to move the needle on student success and completion. In partnership with Public Agenda, Achieving the Dream commissioned the Cutting Edge Series to respond findings that community colleges are facing similar challenges, such as engaging faculty, scaling interventions, and building IR and IT capacity. You can access these papers on topics from building capacity for data-informed decision making to scaling community college interventions here.

Learning Opportunities: Productive Struggle, Explicit Connections and Deliberate Practice

If you were able to participate in the webinar, “It’s Not Just the Curriculum: Developing Pathways for Student Success in Community Colleges,” in January, you heard that Carnegie’s work in developmental mathematics in community colleges — the Statway™  and Quantway™ pathways — is not just another curriculum product or educational technology. Instead, the instruction includes six components. First, we are teaching the math that matters in students’ work, personal and civic lives. Second, given the diverse backgrounds of students in this sector, there are language and literacy supports interwoven through the materials and classroom activities and embedded in the instructional design. Third, we have introduced something called productive persistence to the pathways, science-based activities packaged to increase student motivation, skills and will to succeed in college. The fourth “ingredient” of this mix is learning opportunities: productive struggle, explicit connections and deliberate practice. Fifth, the advancing teaching component aims to provide instructors with the knowledge, skills and habits necessary to experience efficacy in initial use and develop increasing expertise over time. This dimension is essential in seeking to reduce the variability in outcomes among classrooms serving similar students. Finally, we seek to exploit how rapid informative analytics can inform continuous improvements by students, faculty, colleges and network-wide. Operating throughout the instructional system, we seek to tap technology as a powerful tool to advance efficacy, efficiency and personalization in the work of students and faculty alike.

These form a foundation for the lessons within these new innovative pathways for developmental math students. During last year’s Summer Institute, participants in Carnegie’s  Networked Improvement Communities attended a session on learning opportunities. In this session, Kay Merseth, a senior fellow working with Carnegie on a thread of work called Advancing Teaching, prepared an essay that beautifully explains what the three learning opportunities are and what they mean to both students and faculty.

Briefly, in Kay’s words:

“The focus of the productive struggle is on the mathematical learning goals embedded in the problem or situation — it’s not about guessing what the teacher wants to hear or about finding a particular answer. It is about the process of thinking, making sense, and persevering in the face of not knowing exactly how to proceed or whether a particular approach will work. Exploring, investigating one or multiple approaches, and articulating a chain of reasoning behind the approaches also characterize productive struggle.

Within the Pathway materials the idea of explicit connections refers to the linkages or relationships among and between mathematical and/or statistical facts, procedures, and concepts. Explicit connections generally reference math ideas and concepts and may be about context as well. Connections may be drawn by students or faculty, but most often are presented and reinforced by faculty.

Deliberate practice consists of a set of tasks for students that are created to overcome gaps in understanding, apply what has been learned, and/or deepen fluency with key concepts.”

To learn much more about these learning opportunities, read Kay’s essay, “Learning Opportunities for Pathway Classrooms.”

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Ed. note: This post has been revised from the original.

The original post did not include the fifth and sixth components of the pathways. These components — advancing teaching and rapid informative analytics — will be discussed further in future posts.