Improving developmental education—Student course-taking and its implications

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

This is the second 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 what we learned about student course-taking in developmental sequences, its relation with student outcomes, and some implications for state policy.

EdSource studied the remedial course-taking of the 2002 fall cohort of community college students who enrolled in a remedial sequence in English or math. Our analysis found that most began taking remedial courses during their first year of attendance. We also found that, overall, students who failed or withdrew from their first math or writing course were less likely to attempt a second, more advanced course in those subjects.

One message in this for community college educators and for state policymakers is that supporting students’ success during their first year is very important. Such support should include effective placement practices and academic guidance when students enroll, as a new WestEd study highlights.

Our and other studies also identify aspects of student course-taking that, if improved, could help students be more successful and ultimately have a better chance of college completion. Our findings can be summed up as follows:

• Students should not delay starting remedial course work or stop midway through.
• Students should attend full time or as close to full time as possible.
• When students are struggling academically, they need additional support so that they can pass remedial classes on the first attempt.

Actors throughout the system should look for appropriate policy levers and changes in local practice that can encourage and support these goals. But our study indicates that such policies should stop short of mandates that assume all students enroll with the same objectives or are best served by the same educational offerings.

The course-taking data we analyzed in our study enabled us to compare groups of students based on how far below college-level they began their remedial sequences in both math and English. We found notable differences among those groups in regard to both their ages and their aspirations. For example, students who started at the lowest levels tended to be older: 64% of students who began in for-credit arithmetic (the lowest math level we examined) were 19 years old or younger, compared with 92% of those who started in Intermediate Algebra/Geometry. Students’ academic goals also differed. For example, 32% of those who started more than three levels below College Composition said they aspired to transfer when they enrolled compared with 54% of those who began just one level below.

Some have urged that the state needs to set a uniform policy that immediate remediation (when needed) be mandatory across the system. The quantitative findings from this study are neither strong enough nor clear enough to support such a policy. But our research does illuminate some reasons students delay remedial courses and it indicates that those delays take their toll. We hope that this issue gets attention from the task force called for in Senate Bill (SB) 1143 to explore ways to improve student success and completion.