Group items tagged

Explores 13 promising practices for strengthening community college student engagement and success. The practices include assessment and placement, support services, remedial education, academic alert and intervention, and others. (Center for Community College Student Engagement, February 2012 )

This brief makes a case for using cohort and momentum point data, disaggregated by gender, ethnicity, and institution, to improve program practices and community college system policies in California. Findings indicate that too few students reach transfer, retention, and completion milestones, and that a large percentage of students do not always follow enrollment patterns or degree checkpoints, as intended by policy. The brief outlines three recommendations: improving campus data collection practices, creating accountability structures through new funding models and assessment policies, and using data to align institutional and system-level efforts (Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at California State University Sacramento, October 2010).

Provides a summary of key findings from the literature on effective developmental education practice. Descriptions of promising practices are grouped into the following categories: program management and organization; assessment, instruction, and curriculum; student supports; faculty; and public policy. (Wendy Schwartz and Davis Jenkins, Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, September 2007)

Examines developmental education best practices and policies within Massachusetts' 15 community colleges. It presents findings, recommendations and resources to assist the community colleges in improving the success of academically vulnerable students within and beyond developmental education. (Massachusetts Community Colleges Executive Office, June 2009)

Study by MDRC looking at the assessment and placement practices of three community colleges. Findings include tremendous variations in approaches to assess and place students in remedial education.

Describes a set of core principles for effective faculty engagement in the institutional change process. Each principle includes recommendations and practices. (Achieving the Dream and Public Agenda, Fall 2011)

Impact evaluations are important because they provide evidence about what works and does not work. It looks at what caused the improvement, or lack there of. This article from the Center for Effective Philanthropy talks about evaluation from the policy, practice, as well as philanthropy perspective.

Examines the assessment and course placement practices across California's community colleges for incoming students and recommends strategies for overall improvement. (WestEd, September 2010)

Resource shared at the GPG Workshop on Remedial Education in Nashville, TN on October 5-7, 2010.

GPG held a workshop for its network of state leaders to identify and discuss policies and practices that increase the success of students who require remedial education. (Education Commission of the States, October 2010)

Resource shared at the GPG Workshop on Remedial Education in Nashville, TN on October 5-7, 2010

This forum held by the American Youth Policy Forum (AYPF) will spotlight community colleges that address the challenges of developmental education and produce best practices for supporting students' progress toward degree completion. The forum will be held Monday December 13th. Speakers Peter Adams and Elaine Baker have worked with ECS and Getting Past Go in the past.

Research done by MDRC looking at the assessment and placement process at three community colleges. It highlights several issues and challenges, including a lack of consensus about the standard for college-level work, the high-stakes nature of the assessments, and the minimal relationship between assessment for placement and diagnosis for instruction.

Include this report in the resources for the April 29 jam.

Describes Project DEgree pilot at Durham Tech. Project DEgree administered by Gateway to College National Network and funded through grant from Gates Foundation. Model uses evidence-based best practices, cohort-based model and supplementary student service support. Program retention rate of 92% (23 of 25).

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

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)

Discusses core principles and promising practices for engaging faculty in changing community colleges and closing student achievement gaps. (Public Agenda and Achieving the Dream, March 2011)

Partnering with six community colleges, MDRC developed and evaluated four distinct programs based on the following approaches: financial incentives, reforms in instructional practices, and enhancements in student services. (MDRC, March 2011)

Taskforce focused on developing policy and practice around remedial education.

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)

Article in San Antonio Express-News on efforts to increase the success of remedial education programs to save money and improve student success.

The study follows a cohort model and tracks the course-taking patterns of first-time community college students over a seven-year period. The data suggest that aspirations, age, ethnicity, and institutional factors affect students' completion of a developmental course sequence. After presenting the descriptive data, the authors outline five policy implications for their research. Three are particularly relevant to policy discussions we have had at Getting Past Go: using common assessments and early interventions to reduce the need for developmental education; identifying delays in course-taking to develop better-aligned support; and, addressing the issue of students not completing remediation from the lowest course levels.