Posts published on November 2, 2010

Improving developmental education—Implications for academic standards in California

Posted by Mary Perry (Deputy Director) and Matthew Rosin (Senior Research Associate), EdSource, Mountain View, California.

This is the first of three posts drawing from EdSource’s recent study of developmental education in the California Community Colleges, available at www.edsource.org. This post focuses on some key implications of the study related to academic standards in California.

A recent EdSource research study of developmental education in California provides quantitative evidence that the larger national objective of increasing college completions cannot be attained unless more community college students successfully reach the point where they can do college-level work.

Through a series of statistical analyses using student-level data, the EdSource study confirmed other research that points to three areas that are crucial for improving success and completion among students who start out taking remedial courses. Those include reducing the need for developmental education, creating conditions that will help students be more successful in the courses they attempt, and compressing the time it takes for students to get through developmental education.

The study also underscores the extreme variability among California’s community colleges in terms of how they configure their developmental programs and how they place students. At some of the system’s 112 colleges, the approach reflects a thoughtful institutional focus on student needs and the best way to help students succeed. At other campuses it may reflect a lack of attention to developmental education, an accumulation of decisions over many years that have not been re-examined, or a lack of knowledge regarding how to improve.

Accepting that some of these variations are inevitable, greater consistency in some areas could make things better for students.

For example, students need clear information about the academic skills needed for college success. To that end, California’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards—and the work to implement those standards in the next few years—would ideally result in a closer alignment between high school graduation requirements and the readiness expectations of community colleges. That won’t happen without renewed discussions about learning expectations among the state’s K–12 and higher education communities. State policymakers and the leadership in all of the state’s public education sectors will play a crucial role in instigating and facilitating those discussions.

The goals of the Common Core are consistent with the efforts by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to increase the standardization of the system’s placement tests, which is the goal of the CCCAssess pilot project. That standardization is another linchpin in the effort to reduce the need for developmental education in part because of its power to signal clear expectations to K-12 students and faculty. It could also facilitate state policymakers’ ability, working with system leaders, to create common metrics for measuring student readiness. That’s a first critical step if the state wants better measures of student progress and completion rates. These types of data standardization should improve the state’s understanding of the current performance of the system. They could also enhance local faculties’ ability to evaluate their efforts to reform developmental education programs and adjust their strategies as needed.