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The Houston Community College System’s (HCCS) mission is to open the doors to higher education and close academic performance gaps for residents of Houston, one of the most diverse cities in the nation. Its student population of 39,528 is approximately 25% Hispanic, 24% African American, 26% white, and 12% Asian. It has 20 campuses and centers in the southern Texas metropolitan area. The system’s many, dispersed educational locations, along with its large, diverse student body, create challenges for coordinating and allocating resources and for attending to individual students’ needs.
Students come to HCCS with many academic needs. During fall 2003, 92.6% of the full-time, part-time, and transfer students who were enrolled in degree or certificate programs needed remedial math. Sixty-three percent required remedial English, and 43% required remedial reading.
Achieving the Dream Interventions
The college has pursued strategies aimed at increasing completion of developmental education courses. Their primary developmental education intervention is learning communities.
Learning Communities
HCCS is attempting to increase social and academic engagement and increase the success of minority students by linking developmental courses in learning communities. The learning communities include two classes of different disciplines linked at registration, with shared content provided by a team of instructors and a counselor during adjoining class periods. Houston has experimented with many course pairings for the learning communities; while the college initially paired its success course with courses volunteered by professors, they now are pairing developmental education courses with core curriculum courses that have particular focus on developmental math. HCC also often links their student success course with a subject-specific course.
Results
In linked developmental courses, African-American and Hispanic students made significant course completion gains in selected developmental courses as compared to their peer students in similar non-linked courses. For example, in 2007, African-American students successfully completed the selected developmental courses in learning communities at a 75% rate compared to a 65% completion rate for African-American students in the same developmental courses that were not linked in learning communities. Hispanic students successfully completed the selected developmental courses in learning communities at a 79.8% rate compared to a 73.6% completion rate for Hispanic students in the same developmental courses that were not linked in learning communities.
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