Group items tagged

Paper from CCRC identifying the elements of highly effective community colleges.

News article references two new CCRC reports, which suggest that more than a quarter of students placed in remedial courses could pass the gateway course with a "B." The article also indicates that using high school GPA as the placement criterion would be as good of a predictor of college success as remedial assessments.

The study provides evidence on the potential efficacy of a contextualized intervention approach to helping students develop an important academic skill, written summarization. (Center for Community College Research, January 2012)

The report from the Community College Research Center studies the validity of developmental education assessments in predicting retention and student completion odds. While many have focused on instructional innovations, few have studied the empirical power of assessments to predict future performance.

Examines data from Washington State to chart the educational pathways of first-time community college students, with a focus on those from disadvantaged backgrounds. Looks at rates at which students enter a program of study or concentration, amount of remediation taken by students, and rates at which students earn certificates or associate degrees, or transfer to four-year institutions. The paper makes recommendations for practitioners and policymakers. (Community College Research Center, September, 2011)

Paper by Davis Jenkins finds that students should take their remedial education courses as part of a focused program of study, rather than as a stand alone academic activity.

The paper offers suggestions for ways community colleges can rethink their practices at key stages of students' engagement to substantially increase rates of program entry and completion. (Community College Research Center, January 2012)

Finds that students who enrolled in a student success course in the first semester were more likely to earn college-level credits and were more likely to persist to the second year. Also finds that students referred to remedial education were more likely to earn college-level credits if they enrolled in a student success course in their first term. (Community College Research Center, February 2012)

Details the tension between institutions developing innovative approaches to assess students and deliver remedial content and state policies that reinforce the traditional course-based design.

Article discusses a comprehensive evaluation of Achieving the Dream, which reveals that overall trends in student outcomes at the first 26 institutions to join the project remained relatively unchanged after five years, even though the colleges adopted a wide range of strategies to improve them. (Inside Higher Ed, 02/10/11)

Report examines the first 26 colleges to join Achieving the Dream. The colleges developed more sophisticated methods for data analysis and efficient systems for monitoring their efforts to improve student achievement. Conversely, about one-fifth of the colleges still struggled to implement many of the initiative's recommended practices, hindered primarily by weak institutional research capacity. (MDRC and Community College Research Center, February 2011)

Research on the lack of progress that students make in developmental education. It attributes student failure to the fact that they don't begin or complete the full sequence of courses.