Adopting and Adapting Computer-Assisted Learning Strategies

Three community colleges—El Paso Community College, Bunker Hill Community College, and Patrick Henry Community College—incorporated technology into the curriculum to support student progress in mathematics through developmental education. Each college took its own path: El Paso developed a self-accelerated emporium-style computer lab, Patrick Henry incorporated fully modularized math curricula, and Bunker Hill’s contextualized redesign integrated tutoring and skill building. With a comprehensive look at the experience at El Paso Community College and supplementary examples from Bunker Hill Community College and Patrick Henry Community College, we begin to understand how colleges can enact effective reforms in developmental education that are uniquely appropriate to their institutions.

In February 2012, MDC convened DEI college teams composed of faculty, administrators, and presidents. We mixed them up—different colleges, different states, different roles—and asked them to create the ideal path for underprepared students to get from college entry to credential completion. Drawing on their collective knowledge, particularly what they’d learned during DEI, the teams considered four points of interaction with students or potential students: early intervention and access, advising and support services, developmental education instruction, and alignment with credential and degree programs. Six teams and six hours later, we had six designs that displayed a remarkable amount of consensus about the programs, policies, and institutional supports needed to help any student be successful on the path from college enrollment to credential completion. This piecesynthesizes our DEI college teams’ recommended best program bets and related critical institutional policies for helping all students succeed at what they set out to accomplish in community college.

Less than 25 percent of college students who take any developmental education courses earn a credential within eight years. Over the past three years, the six states in the Developmental Education Initiative have developed and enacted unprecedented changes in policy and practice in an effort to improve outcomes in developmental classes. The reforms by Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia are designed to help more students who are placed in to developmental education accelerate into credit-bearing college courses and continue their momentum through to credentials with value. The network of states in DEI undertook bold reforms such as redesigning the delivery of remediation, improving the collection and use of student data to guide priorities and investment, and enacting outcomes-based funding to provide incentives for colleges to encourage innovative solutions to long-standing performance challenges.

Community colleges play a vital role in advancing educational and economic opportunity for many Americans, especially low-income students and students of color. Without these institutions, our higher education system would be inaccessible to a large portion of our citizenry. Today, America is counting on community colleges to help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic security; community colleges are spending more time in the spotlight — and facing increased scrutiny — given the current status of the economy, of national college completion rates, and an increasing mismatch between available jobs and the skills of those available to work. Colleges across the country are responding in innovative ways, but sustaining the services, instruction, and training to meet these challenges will require colleges to move beyond small programs, no matter how successful. We’re not just asking community colleges to soothe some of our toughest educational and economic woes, we’re asking them to do it “at scale.”

When research suggested the length of time spent in developmental education courses can impede college persistence, Zane State College, with the support of a Developmental Education Initiative grant, designed two types of courses to accelerate developmental students’ progress to college-level: compressed math courses and developmental courses linked to college-level general education courses. Despite very successful student outcomes, the college faced challenges attracting student enrollment and scaling up the initiative to serve a larger target population. The presenters will share strategies and data obtained at two strategic decision points. Panelists will then ask small groups to devise alternative strategies for scaling up enrollment and increasing student engagement, and then share Zane State’s actual changes in advising, marketing, and classroom practices. The workshop will be a collaborative exercise in data-informed decisionmaking. Participants will obtain valuable insight into how to adjust to student needs and overcome barriers in developmental education course redesign.

• Becky Ament, Associate Dean for Developmental Education, Zane State College, OH
• Beth Fischer, Director of Institutional Research and Planning, Zane State College, OH

In this issue: New Jersey’s Big Ideas Project Integrates Many Achieving the Dream Strategies; Achieving the Dream and Developmental Education Initiative States Receive Federal Funds to Support Workforce Development; Adult Basic Education Alignment in Indiana.

As a leader in the Developmental Education Initiative, you possess the unique authority to spread the word about our groundbreaking work to help every American complete the college credential needed for a living-wage job and a middle-class life. Because you’re a busy executive, we’ve assembled this toolkit to make this responsibility easier. Please use these ideas and materials as you speak with colleagues, policymakers, contacts in your community, and other external audiences.

This guide explains the four important themes we’re all working to communicate. We offer them with some suggested language that we can all use in our conversations with various constituencies so that we all reinforce one another’s efforts.

This handout offers examples of promising practices for you to use when talking about developmental education or DEI.

This handout offers advice on how to talk about developmental education and DEI to anyone interested in learning more.

Across the nation, state governments and private foundations are pursuing the long-elusive goal of improving college completion rates. Driving these efforts is a growing awareness of the large proportion of students who come to college—especially community college—unprepared for college-level coursework. This challenge is one that the states and colleges involved in Achieving the Dream and its Developmental Education Initiative have been addressing for several years.

Now states are turning to a familiar tool in education reform—assessment—as a valuable lever to improve college readiness. Testing Ground describes how Florida’s Division of Colleges worked with K-12 partners to design, plan, and launch an ambitious college-readiness agenda with a new college placement test as its centerpiece. By using data to create a sense of urgency, making faculty central players, and ensuring that prominent champions keep the efforts alive, Florida’s education system is well on its way to implementing major college-readiness reforms.

This guide, produced by Cuyahoga Community College, offers vital tips and strategies for being an effective Supplemental Instruction leader.

A significant redesign of remedial education—how it is organized, delivered, and taught—is required if the nation’s community colleges are to achieve more than incremental progress in increasing student success. The vast majority of our nation’s community colleges need substantial ongoing supports to do so.

The most logical and efficient locus of such support is on the state level, through policies and capacity-building efforts that identify promising practices, test program outcomes, and disseminate proven models quickly and effectively. Six states—Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia—are putting the state policy strategy into action through the Developmental Education Initiative, launched in 2009 by MDC and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation.

Driving Innovation describes what the DEI states have set out to do and why, the momentum they have developed, and next steps in their efforts to overcome obstacles to better results.

This booklet provides advice on how to reach out to reporters, how to identify newsworthy stories, and what to do if you're approached by a reporter.

The Developmental Education Initiative is a groundbreaking effort led by MDC and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation for Education to scale-up developmental education innovations within the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. Helping students progress through developmental education more quickly—or bypass it altogether—reduces students’ financial burden and increases the likelihood they’ll stay in school and receive a postsecondary credential.

Bridge programs are a 21st-century idea for helping prepare low-skilled individuals for jobs that require more education. Known by many names—integrated education and training, contextualized learning, embedded skills—bridge programs assist students in obtaining academic, employability, and technical skills they need to enter and succeed in postsecondary education and training and the labor market.

BridgeConnect is a national survey designed to help determine the depth and breadth of bridge programs throughout the country. Quantifying the number and types of programs in operation can help policymakers and funders improve both policy and practice related to adult education. A critical mass of bridge programs may suggest the approach is ready for rigorous evaluation; that an effort to formally identify standard of excellence is warranted; or that it is time to identify strategies for scaling up the most effective programs.

Developmental education is designed to provide students with weak academic skills the opportunity to strengthen those skills enough to prepare them for college-level coursework. Experts do not agree on the meaning of being “college ready,” and policies governing assessment, placement, pedagogy, staffing, completion, and eligibility for enrollment in college-level, credit-bearing courses vary from state to state, college to college, and program to program. The developmental education process is confusing enough simply to describe, yet from the point of view of the student, especially one with very weak academic skills and little previous success in school, it may appear as a bewildering set of unanticipated obstacles involving several assessments, classes in more than one subject area, and sequences of courses requiring three or more semesters of study before the student (often a high school graduate) is judged prepared for college-level work.

The policy deliberation and especially the research about developmental education give scant attention to this confusion and complexity. Discussion typically assumes that the state of being “college ready” is well-defined, and it often elides the distinction between students who need remediation and those who actually enroll in developmental courses. What is more, developmental education is often discussed without acknowledgement of the extensive diversity of services that bear that label. Any comprehensive understanding of developmental education and any successful strategy to improve its effectiveness cannot be built on such a simplistic view.

In this Brief, which summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center on patterns of student progression through developmental education, we broaden the discussion by moving beyond consideration of the developmental course and focus attention instead on the developmental sequence.

In recent years, discussion has arisen among educational researchers and practitioners on how best to teach academically underprepared community college students the basic skills they need to be able to learn from a college curriculum. Research conducted by the Community College Research Center (Perin & Charron, 2006) has found that many creative approaches are used in developmental education, but there exists little quantitative evidence on their effectiveness. The study summarized here begins to fill this research gap. With funding from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, an intervention called the Content Comprehension Strategy Intervention (CCSI) was developed and tested at three community colleges. CCRC researchers drafted and pilot-tested the intervention in collaboration with science and developmental education faculty and senior administrators at Bronx Community College. The intervention was further tested and revised at Los Angeles Pierce College and Norwalk Community College. In this Brief, we describe the intervention and present data suggesting that it is a promising strategy for community college students who need to improve their reading and writing skills.

Developmental Education Initiative’s State Policy Framework & Strategy specifies the levers that state policymakers have at their disposal to support more effective ways of changing the organization and delivery of developmental education—and public expectations of individual and institutional success. Plus, it provides states with a clear, efficient guide for organizing and prioritizing their efforts toward this goal.

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) is engaged in a strategic planning process to improve performance beyond the goals in Dateline 2009, the system’s current vision and plan. A key objective is to encourage colleges to improve retention and academic success for students, particularly the substantial numbers who arrive unprepared for college-level work. Specifically, the VCCS seeks to improve the rates at which underprepared students complete developmental coursework and advance to take and pass college courses, particularly the initial college-level, or “gatekeeper,” math and English offerings. 

The VCCS asked the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Teachers College, Columbia University, to conduct analyses to inform its efforts to improve student outcomes. In response, CCRC designed a study to address the following question: What student characteristics, course-taking patterns, and other factors are associated with higher probabilities that students who require remediation will take and pass college-level math and English?

This report presents the main findings from CCRC’s study and outlines suggestions for steps that the VCCS and its member colleges might take to improve completion of gatekeeper courses by the many students who enter the state’s community colleges poorly prepared to succeed in college-level work.

California’s 110 community colleges are an essential part of the state’s higher education and workforce development structure, serving over 2.6 million students annually. But a growing number of students face major obstacles to success, including inadequate preparation for college-level courses, and many end up dropping out. New scholarship suggests that student support services, such as academic and personal advising, counseling, tutoring, and financial aid, are critically important for promoting better academic outcomes for students. The challenge is to integrate these support services with academic instruction. Unfortunately, the very way most community colleges are organized — with student services housed in one division and academic functions in another, each functioning in parallel but with little coordination — creates obstacles to successful integration. These obstacles are often exacerbated by competition between the divisions for limited budget resources.

To help overcome this divide, the Student Support Partnership Integrating Resources and Education (SSPIRE) initiative was funded by the James Irvine Foundation and coordinated by MDRC. SSPIRE aimed to increase the success of young, low-income, and academically underprepared California community college students by helping community colleges strengthen their support services and better integrate these services with academic instruction. Nine California community colleges were selected to participate in SSPIRE, and each received as much as $250,000 in total from 2006 through early 2009.

This report describes how the SSPIRE colleges implemented four basic approaches to integrating student services with instruction: learning communities, a “drop-in” study center, a summer math program, and case management programs.The report also presents some of the colleges’ own data, which suggest that SSPIRE services may have led to modest improvements in students’ course pass rates and persistence in college. Finally, this report offers cross-cutting lessons drawn from MDRC’s research on the initiative. These lessons present practitioners and policymakers across the state and nation with examples from well-implemented programs that integrated student services with academic instruction.

Much has been written about the high percentage of high school and GED graduates who enter community colleges needing remedial coursework and the low rates of retention and graduation for these students. Reports on how to improve outcomes for underprepared students often focus on the merits of adopting specific program components such as learning communities, computer-assisted instruction, accelerated learning, supplemental instruction, career-based curricula, intensive advisement, or faculty inquiry groups. Certainly, many of these can be useful features of a high-quality transition or remedial program. Unfortunately, though, too little attention is given to exactly how instructors teach students in these classrooms. There is an urgent need to re-examine the
ways we teach underprepared students entering college. Re-focusing attention on pedagogy must also cause us to re-think how we approach content, assessment, curricula, staff development, student placement, and research.

This paper describes how the College Transition Program (CTP) has attempted to strengthen GED graduates’ transition into The City University of New York (CUNY) through a semester of reading, writing, mathematics, and academic advisement. More precisely, this paper focuses on math teaching and learning in CTP.

CTP has worked almost exclusively with GED graduates, but we believe the early results will be interesting to a variety of programs working with students who enter college underprepared in math including GED programs more widely, college remedial math departments, and high schools. This paper is for instructors and administrators who work in these settings as well as for researchers, policy makers, and funders. At times, some technical math teaching language may be used but the bulk of these instances are limited to the footnotes and appendices. Much of this paper should be readable by a wide audience.

In this issue: Lessons from Achieving the Dream for Federal Efforts to Improve College Completion Rates; Robert Shireman, Deputy Undersecretary for External Affairs and Outreach, U.S. Department of Education; Developmental Education in Focus; Updates from Achieving the Dream States.

Many experts in the world of mathematics and beyond contend that we cannot meet our developmental math student success goals without incorporating technology. The implementation of innovative technology in program design and practice, as reviewed in this report, provides us with an initial look at how technology can be used to expand, strengthen, and create efficiencies in the delivery of developmental math practice. Despite an expanding knowledge base in developmental1 math practice and the rapid expansion of technology in education, critical challenges remain in maximizing the promise inherent in these innovations. These include blending best practices in developmental math with leading technological innovation, developing a more robust and convincing evidence base, expanding development efforts for promising learning technologies, and overcoming the resistance to change that characterizes the organizational culture of many community colleges.

This report looks at the challenges of remediating math skills in community colleges and the potential of technology to address these challenges. It begins with a short review of current instructional strategies in community college developmental math, including the central pedagogical approaches. The paper continues by identifying several categories of emerging curricular innovations and presenting examples of how selected strategies are being implemented in community colleges. The main body of the report focuses on technology and its role in supporting and strengthening the teaching of developmental math, including the current use of technology as well as promising directions for future use. It concludes with a discussion of adoption challenges in moving forward, from both a curricular and institutional perspective. The report is intended as a broad overview of current practices rather than an in-depth study or recommendation of particular instructional methods.

In this issue: Transfer and Articulation Policies in Achieving the Dream States; Francesca Purcell and Gretchen Schmidt on Sustainable Transfer Policy Reform; Summary of Achieving the Dream 2008–09 State Work Plans.

In this issue: Winter 2008 State Policy Meeting Take-Aways and Next Steps; Bob Gabriner and Barbara Illowsky on the California Basic Skills Initiative; New Issue Brief on Placement Test Policies.

In this issue: State Action Plans for 2007-08; Connecticut Community College Chancellor Reflects on Achieving the Dream Impact; You Never Know What Might Happen: Reports from North Carolina and Texas.

In this issue: Six States Join; Developmental Education Data from Achieving the Dream Colleges; Accelerating Remedial Math Education Policy Challenges and Strategies; State Policy Developments: What’s New in Achieving the Dream States.

This brief guide offers 25 essential tips for developing an effective developmental education program.

The newsletter highlights progress of the Achieving the Dream State Policy Teams in identifying and promoting policies that support colleges’ efforts to improve student outcomes. Featured in this issue: Regional Accreditation and Student Success in Community Colleges.

An electronic policy newsletter is published quarterly by Jobs for the Future. The newsletter highlights progress of the Achieving the Dream State Policy Teams in identifying and promoting policies that support colleges’ efforts to improve student outcomes. Featured in this issue: Efforts to Improve State Data Systems Get a Boost.

An electronic policy newsletter is published quarterly by Jobs for the Future. The newsletter highlights progress of the Achieving the Dream State Policy Teams in identifying and promoting policies that support colleges’ efforts to improve student outcomes. Featured in this issue: Framework For Identifying And Setting State Policy Priorities.

Since April 1999, the Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has conducted a Program in Course Redesign with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts. The purpose of this institutional grant program is to encourage colleges and universities to redesign their instructional approaches using technology to achieve quality enhancements as well as cost savings. Redesign projects focus on large-enrollment, introductory courses, which have the potential of impacting significant student numbers and generating substantial cost savings.

This report provides an analysis of the results of the third round projects, with a focus on the most important quality improvement and cost reduction techniques used in the redesigns, the implementation issues they encountered, and the projected sustainability of the course redesigns.