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Published by American Association of Community Colleges, April 2012. From this page, you can download a PDF of the full report, as well as video about the report, information on the 21st-Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges, and coverage of this report in the media.

By Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran and Phoebe Richman, with Amanda Grossman. National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) Teachers College Columbia University. February 2012. Link to full report at the bottom of the summary on this page. The colleges in this study are two of six in the NCPR Learning Communities Demonstration, in which random assignment evaluations are being used to determine the impacts of learning communities on student success. NCPR has presented finding from all six colleges. They show that when one-semester learning communities have impacts, they tend to be concentrated in the semester in which students are enrolled in the program. Another report, a final one will be released in 2012. That report synthesizes the findings across all colleges studied and includes an additional semester of student follow-up at each college.

The Innovating Pedagogy blog is a forum for Open University to distribute their Innovating Pedagogy 2012 report (click on report for a PDF download) and also for each of the 10 innovations to be described and commented on by the larger community.

By James Britton. Technical Report on National Writing Project website. Link to PDF download of report. Author discusses teacher developed strategies used to encourage children to learn to write-and-read. Together these create a literacy learning environment.

By Sara Lipka in the Students section of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 11 2010. Reporting on the latest report from the Center for Community College Student Engagement, which states that "Increasing college completion is meaningless unless certificates and degrees represent real learning, which community colleges must work harder to ensure."

In the Students section of The Chronicle of Higher Education by Katherine Mangan, Jan 23 2013. The article summarizes a report by the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment. The commission just completed a year-long review of completion issues.

by Rose Asera, October 2011. Full report available to download. Case study report describes Virginia's process of redesigning developmental education system-wide. To start, developmental mathematics will be taught as a series of nine one-credit modules, with students taking only the modules they need. (originally bookmarked in GPG group)

Published by Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2010. This report looks at the Survey of Entering Student Engagement (SENSE), launched fall 2006. From the report, "To date, more than 91,000 students from 197 colleges in 37 states have participated in SENSE, thereby helping to create a wealth of new and actionable data about the entering community college student experience."

By Catherine Gewertz, Education Week, February 2 2011. A new report, Pathways to Prosperity, published by Harvard's Graduate School of Education, argues that the "college for all" goal might fail students best suited for emerging "middle skills" jobs (e.g. construction manager or dental hygienist). The researchers feel that many who are not suited for college fall out of the educational system completely rather than pursuing other post-secondary options.

Published by the Lumina Foundation. Draft published January 2011. Authors include Cliff Adelman, Peter Ewell, Paul Gaston, and Carol Geary Schneider. This report attempts to describe what broad body of knowledge constitutes a post-secondary degree at the associate's, bachelor's, and master's level.

By Kara Spak, Chicago Sun-Times, May 31, 2011. This article cites a recent report released by the Alliance for Excellent Education, which finds that "as many as one-third of students entering higher education need to take some sort of remedial or developmental course...." Putting a human face on these statistics is the profile of one student who graduated from high school with a 3.0 GPA and a B in "College Algebra" but still needed to take a non-credit developmental math course when she got to community college.

By the SOURCE on Community College Issues, Trends & Strategies, May 2011. For this report, the SOURCE's editor-in-chief interviewed eleven community college leaders from across the country. Questions relate to: college readiness, remedial education, workforce development, educational technologies, student services, data analysis, funding/grants

By Thomas J. Snyder in The Hechinger Report, May 3 2011. Snyder, president of the nation's largest state-wide community college (Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana), argues that governors who cut funding to community colleges are being short-sighted, and argues for the importance of community colleges in the economic recovery.

NYTimes: The Choice: As many as four out of five community college students in the United States want to transfer to a four-year institution so they can obtain a bachelor's degree, according to a report released Thursday by the College Board.

From the Introduction, "Mathgrapher is a mathematical graphing tool for 2D and 3D functions and data. It includes linear and nonlinear curve fitting, integration and analysis of coupled ordinary differential equations (ODE's) and multi-dimensional iterative maps, matrix operations, Lindenmayer systems and some cellular automata." Though the site indicates that the MathGrapher hasn't been updated since 2007, the site was recently given a positive review by University of Wisconsin's Internet Scout Report.

by Jon Marcus on The Hechinger Report, December 26, 2011. Open University, a successful British online public university to be used as a model in the U.S. The goal is to help students who are intimidated by higher education adapt to and succeed in college. Next Generation Learning Challenges, a Gates funded initiative, will adapt two free Open University, at-your-own-pace online courses for use at about a dozen U.S. colleges and universities this academic year: one to help students be more comfortable with math so they do better on placement tests or move more quickly through remedial courses, and another to teach students skills to prepare them for college.

By Josh Fischman, and part of The Chronicle (of Higher Education's) 2011 Special Report on Online Learning, published Nov 6 2011. Central Piedmont Community College developed an Online Student Portal learning system to improve retention among its students. They have had success with the system (in use 2004-2008). Now, with a Next Gen grant, they will roll the system out to 6 additional local schools to see if they can match the retention improvements. The system is based both on learning styles and on frequent intervention by students and counselors.

By Jennifer Gonzalez, Students section, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February2 2012. The new project is being led by the Center for Community College Student Engagement and will analyze data from four different surveys: Community College Survey of Student Engagement, the Survey of Entering Student Engagement, the Community College Faculty Survey of Student Engagement, and the newly created Community College Institutional Survey. Reports will be produced annually for the next three years. See CCCSE tag for first year's report.

Published by the Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE), 2012. This is the first of three annual reports to look at "strategies that appear to be associated with a variety of indicators of student progress and success." For more on this project, follow the tag CCCSE.

By Ian Quillen of the Digital Education (blog) in Education Week, September 2 2010. This study suggests that "Algebra I teachers who were trained in and used a program that allowed them to monitor students' progress on graphing calculators led to significantly improved achievement by their students on a researcher-designed test." This blog post (and the video link) both stress that it is the combination of technology AND professional development that has provided these positive results. \nNOTE: First link to Summary of Findings is a Texas Instruments report (TI produces the graphing calculator that is part of the study). However, the study was conducted with outside consultants, including SRI.