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.

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.
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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.
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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.

Community Colleges in the News

You might be interested in the release of a couple of reports on community colleges and a news article on the budget situation in California and how community colleges are affected.

OPEN-DOOR POLICIES AT TWO-YEAR COLLEGES FACE THREAT, REPORT SAYS
The nation’s college-completion agenda may be threatening open-door admissions policies at two-year institutions, says a report released by the American Association of Community Colleges. The organization is concerned that colleges may become more selective in admissions in an attempt to meet graduation goals, and will therefore limit college access for disadvantaged students. Community colleges are known for their open-door policies, which allow all types of students to enroll. The information is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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ACCELERATING COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS’ ENTRY INTO AND COMPLETION OF PROGRAMS OF STUDY
In this updated paper, originally released by the Community College Research Center in April 2011, Davis Jenkins and Sung-Woo Cho argue that to improve completion rates on a substantial scale, community colleges must ensure that new students enter a coherent college-level program of study as soon as possible. It presents a simple method for measuring program entry and completion rates using data on students’ actual course-taking behaviors rather than declared major or intent. The paper offers research-based suggestions for ways community colleges can rethink their practices at key stages of the student experience to accelerate program entry and completion.
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PROPOSAL WILL HURT COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS
The Institute for College Success posted that the dramatic changes proposed by California Governor Jerry Brown would lock out more than a third of applicants currently eligible for entitlement grants. These are students who have worked hard and earned the grades that the state has long promised entitled them to participate in California’s primary student aid program. These are also the students, research shows, for whom financial aid may make the biggest difference in terms of helping them persist and succeed in college. As they finally reach the point where they are ready to go to college, many will find their dreams shattered. Three out of four applicants cut out would be prospective Cal Grant B students, who on average have family incomes well below the poverty line. And the majority of these students go to community colleges, where students receive too little aid and already less likely to receive state grants.
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Juggling student access and success

An article by the Associated Press examines the way California community college leaders are struggling with the competing demands of student access and success.

CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE LEADERS CALL FOR OVERHAUL
California community college leaders have signed off on major policy changes aimed at boosting graduation and transfer rates in the 112-campus system, despite concerns measures could hurt disadvantaged students. The 22 recommendations will go to the state Legislature for review after the California Community Colleges’ governing board on Monday (1/10/11) endorsed the measures recommended by the state-appointed Student Success Task Force. Backers believe the proposals, if implemented, will help more students complete degree and certificate program and transfer to University of California and California State University campuses. That would help reduce the number of dropouts and create a more educated workforce.
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Mathematics and Democracy and What We Know

LESSONS LEARNED FROM MATHEMATICS AND DEMOCRACY
“Indeed, as the twenty-first century unfolds, quantitative literacy will come to be seen not just as a minor variation in the way we functioned in the twentieth century but as a radically transformative vantage point from which to view education, policy, and work.”
Mathematics and Democracy (2001)

At a recent meeting of Carnegie partners and staff involved in the community college developmental mathematics initiative, we invited Bernard Madison, among others, to provide us with some insight into the current thinking around quantitative literacy (QL). Madison is a mathematician and mathematics educator with extensive experience in research, teaching, curriculum reform, university administration and science policy. He is at the University of Arkansas and currently his work in QL and teacher education is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.  In advance of his visit, Madison directed us to reading material that included an article written with Lynn Arthur Steen of St. Olaf College, Reflections on the Tenth Anniversary of Mathematics and Democracy, published by the electronic journal of the National Numeracy Network, Numeracy: Advancing Education in Quantitative Literacy.

In the introduction, Steen explains that when the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation- sponsored report, Mathematics and Democracy (M&D),  was released in 2001, it became clear that “numeracy mattered for citizenship as much as for science; that effective strategies for analyzing problems were very similar across different contextual domains, and that civic rationale for quantitative literacy was both more urgent and more compelling than scientific ones.”  One editor wrote that the publication made QL respectable. Yet, the authors note that there still remains a major shortcoming in most mathematics education: the lack of connections to commonplace issues.

The article and an accompanying piece, Quantitative Reasoning in the Contemporary World, 1: The Course and It’s Challenges, by Madison and fellow Arkansas professor Shannon Dingman, look at the success of the News Math course at UA and find the course has a radical impact on students, not the least of which is the shift in the students’ views “regarding the relevance of the mathematics in their everyday life.”

This shift is an important one to Carnegie as we look at student persistence and attempt to address a significant factor that leads to disengagement and lack of motivation to persevere in math classes for many developmental students: that the students find the current developmental math course content irrelevant, dull and boring.

UNLOCKING THE GATE
MDRC just released a literature review by Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow and Emily Schneider, Unlocking the Gate: What We Know About Improving Developmental Education. The authors write in the overview: One of the greatest challenges that community colleges face in their efforts to increase graduation rates is improving the success of students in their developmental, or remedial, education programs — the courses that students without adequate academic preparation must take before they can enroll in courses for college credit. Emphasizing results from experimental and quasi-experimental studies, this literature review identifies the most promising approaches for revising the structure, curriculum, or delivery of developmental education and suggests areas for future innovations in developmental education practice and research. This analysis focuses on four different types of interventions for improving students’ progress through remedial education and into college-level courses, including (1) strategies that help students avoid developmental education by shoring up their skills before they enter college; (2) interventions that accelerate students’ progress through developmental education by shortening the timing or content of their courses; (3) programs that provide contextualized basic skills together with occupational or college-content coursework; and (4) programs that enhance the supports for developmental-level learners, such as advising or tutoring.

Improving student success in community colleges

COMMUNITY COLLEGE RESEARCH CENTER (CCRC) RELEASES NEW POLICY BRIEFS

PERFORMANCE INCENTIVES TO IMPROVE COMMUNITY COLLEGE COMPLETION: LEARNING FROM WASHINGTON STATE’S STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT INITIATIVE
By Nancy Shulock and Davis Jenkins
In 2007, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges launched the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), a system-wide policy to reward colleges for improvements in student achievement. This policy brief examines key issues raised by Washington State’s experience to date with the SAI in order to inform the conversation currently occurring in many states on how to use state policy levers to meet ambitious state and national goals for increased college completion.

FACILITATING STUDENT LEARNING THROUGH CONTEXTUALIZATION
By Dolores Perin
The paper considers the hypothesis that low-skilled students can learn more effectively and advance to college-level programs more readily through contextualization of basic skills instruction, and presents two forms of contextualization that have been studied: “contextualized” and “integrated” instruction.

ONLINE LEARNING: DOES IT HELP LOW-INCOME AND UNDERPREPARED STUDENTS?
By Shanna Smith Jaggars
The paper explores why students might struggle in these courses, discusses current access barriers to online education, and offers suggestions on how public policy and institutional practice could be changed to allow online learning to better meet its potential in terms of improving both college access and student progression.