How To Improve Community College Developmental Education: Part 2

Guest blogger, Nancy Shulock, California State University-Sacramento

California and the nation are facing the challenge of increasing college attainment levels while serving the growing population of under-prepared students in its colleges. We can learn from what leading-edge states are doing to increase the success of under-prepared students for whom traditional remedial sequences have not proven effective.  A review of developmental education policy reforms reveals the following trends[i]:

1. Minimizing the time students spend in remedial coursework by replacing long sequences of semester-long courses with options that include:

• modular courses with open entry/open exit as students’ competencies dictate
• contextualized remedial courses whereby students learn basic skills in the context of substantive content, sometimes in paired courses
• supplemental remedial instruction where students with limited deficiencies enroll in college-level courses and receive targeted assistance with needed basic skills

 

1. Achieving a balance between permissiveness and restrictiveness with respect to access to college-level courses by under-prepared students by:

• allowing students into college-level courses concurrent with their remedial enrollments as long as the course does not require skills related to those that need remediation (the key being reading – states generally do not allow students who are not proficient in reading to take college-level courses)
• requiring students to begin and complete remediation early by setting limits, for example, on the number of credits students may earn before completing remediation

 

1. Using content review to support the overall reform goal of ensuring that students spend only the minimal time needed in remedial education by:

• examining and aligning the content of college-level and remedial courses
• using that content review as the basis for placing or directing students into appropriate courses

 

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[i] Education Commission of the States, Getting Past Go: Rebuilding the Remedial Education Bridge to College Success, May, 2010, as supplemented by personal communication with lead author Bruce Vandal, July 2, 2010.

How To Improve Community College Developmental Education: Part One

Guest blogger:  Nancy Shulock, Director, Institute For Higher Education Leadership &Policy, California State- Sacramento, nshulock@csus.edu

This is the first of three blogs on these issues

The United States is facing increasingly inadequate college attainment levels and the threat of losing competitive standing on the global stage. A major reason for low college attainment is that while enrollment rates are generally high, completion rates are low – especially in community colleges. In community colleges, the great majority of students enter under-prepared for college-level study – some seriously under-prepared. Large percentages of these students never get through remedial education, let alone to college completion.

How can we better serve the growing numbers of entering students in California’s community colleges who are not prepared for college-level work so we can increase college completion in the state?  Should they be required to take remedial coursework right away or at all? What courses should they be allowed to take before they have completed remedial work? What kind of remedial instruction is most effective?  Recently, the Academic Senate of the California Community Colleges (ASCCC) passed a resolution calling for the modification of the process for establishing prerequisites for student entry into college-level courses. The current system for establishing prerequisites is a complex statistical validation for each pair of courses (the college course and the proposed prerequisite course) to demonstrate with historical data that the prerequisite course increases a student’s chances of passing the college course. This process is rarely used due to its complexity and the difficulty of meeting established statistical criteria. Therefore, few prerequisites are in place. With few prerequisites, students have open access to college-level courses whether or not they can read or write at college level or perform basic mathematics.  Some under-prepared students pass those courses and some fail or drop them. Unfortunately, because assessment isn’t strictly required and assessment scores are not recorded in the CCC data system, we cannot determine the numbers of under-prepared students who enroll in college-level courses or their rates of success or failure in those courses.

The ASCCC proposal is to allow colleges to use “content review” instead of statistical validation. With content review, faculty experts in their fields determine the reading, writing, and/or math competencies that students need to succeed in a given college level course in another discipline, (e.g., History, Economics), determine the courses (most likely basic skills courses) that provide those competencies, and set course prerequisites accordingly.

The proposal is controversial, with two diametrically opposed sets of beliefs. One side believes that setting prerequisites will harm under-represented minority students by consigning them to basic skills sequences from which they will not emerge. They cite data showing that substantial numbers of under-prepared students pass transfer-level courses without first completing reading, writing, and/or math remediation as evidence that we direct too many students to basic skills courses. The other side believes that failing to set prerequisites will harm under-represented minority students by allowing them to enroll in classes for which they are not prepared to succeed. They cite data showing that substantial numbers of under-prepared students fail to successfully complete transfer-level courses and cite anecdotal evidence of faculty acknowledging the need to lower academic standards to accommodate students in their classes who lack fundamental skills in reading, writing, and/or math.

This issue cannot be resolved on the basis of available data. We lack student-level data on high school transcripts and college assessment results to know who is, and is not, judged to be proficient when they enroll in transfer-level classes. Without this data, we cannot compare the performance of students with equal preparation levels who take a transfer-level course with or without having become proficient. We also lack measures of quality or standards for college-level classes, so we cannot know whether under-prepared students pass those courses because they mastered college-level work without completing basic skills or because the course could be successfully completed without, for example, having to read or write at college level. Additionally, we lack measures of quality or standards for remedial courses. If data show that students are not helped by remediation, we don’t know whether it is because they should not be directed to remediation or because the remedial courses are not of sufficient quality.

College Trustees Need to Do More to Increase Student Learning And Completion

The following is from the Carnegie Foundation. Click on blue highlight for the survey.

MANY COLLEGE BOARDS ARE AT SEA IN ASSESSING STUDENT LEARNING, SURVEY FINDS
While oversight of educational quality is a critical responsibility of college boards of trustees, a majority of trustees and chief academic officers say boards do not spend enough time discussing student-learning outcomes, and more than a third say boards do not understand how student learning is assessed, says a report by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. This article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Are For-Profit Colleges Reforming Themselves?

  The September 11 issue of the Economist highlights self imposed reforms by for-profit colleges like Phoenix and Kaplan. Some of these changes are:

  -Hiring there own mystery shoppers to test their sales practices to prospective students.

-Disconnecting recruiters pay from the number of students recruited

-Create a three week orientation during which students can quit without charge

Offering a full refund if students drop out during their first term

 Calling for new federal and state regulations to apply to the non profit colleges.

  I wonder how wide spread these policies will become throughout the industry.

How Colleges Can Help Students Complete Bachelors Degrees #2

A new report , Advancing By Degrees has been published by The Institute For Higher Education Leadership And Policy (www.CSUS.EDU/IHELP ). They use data from California and Florida including community college transfers, and students who enroll from high school in 4 year degrees.  The report provides specific practices and policies colleges can use to enhance completion based on longitudinal attainment patterns of students. Two of these policies are college use of student milestones and on-track indicators as a basis for intervention policies to help students.

Some of these indicators are :

• Begin remedial coursework in first term, if needed
• Complete college-level math and/or English in the first or second year
• Complete a college-success course or other first-year experience program
• Complete high percentage of courses attempted (low rate of course dropping and/or failure)
• Complete 20-30 credits in the first year
• Earn summer credits
• Enroll full time
• Enroll continuously without stop-outs
• Register on time for courses
• Maintain adequate grade-point average

The key is not just collecting this data but using it as a warning system to identify and help students who are not doing well on some of the indicators.

How Colleges Can Help Students Complete Bachelors Degrees

A new report , Advancing By Degrees has been published by The Institute For Higher Education Leadership And Policy (www.CSUS.EDU/IHELP ). They use data from California and Florida including community college transfers, and students who enroll from high school in 4 year degrees.   Here is a crucial excerpt:

“Interestingly, a higher percentage of students who did not complete a degree took a success course than those who did complete.  One likely explanation of this finding is that students are either directed towards success courses or choose to enroll in success courses if they are at higher risk for not completing, so the findings reflect enrollment in the course more than the impact of the course.  We also found that completion of gateway courses–college-level math and English–did not appear to explain why these students did not earn a bachelor’s degree.  A large majority of students who did not earn a bachelor’s degree did complete these courses.  Consequently, this analysis suggests that the appropriate institutional response would be to help students complete a higher percentage of courses and enroll continuously.  Interventions might include integrating supplemental instruction into courses with high failure rates, institution “early alert” systems to identify students having trouble in particular courses, limiting the number of course withdrawals, and examining the adequacy of financial aid policies.”

More on the details of an early alert system in next blog.

Are ACT Tests For All Students A Good State Policy ?

Eight state require all students to take ACT college tests in grade 11. Questions have been raised on how ACT tests align with the other state tests for grades 2-10. Is the content and rigor similar? How does ACT align with the new common core standards adopted by 38 states? ACT is a good signaling device for students to know whether they are college ready.

A proposed plan by the North Carolina Board of Education would require most 11th-grade students to take the ACT. Students also will take pre-tests leading to the ACT in 8th and in 10th grade. ACT scores will be used as a factor in determining how well schools are educating students. Schools also will be able to identify students who do poorly on the exam and encourage them to attend an academic “boot camp” in the summer after their junior year. See a new Center for Evaluation and Education Policy report on this topic

Federal Government Provides $330 Million For College Ready Tests

  The  Obama administration has made huge grants to create new testing formats and designs that  will link k-12 statewide tests to college standards. This is the second phase of the common core standards movement that will spread to 44 states. These assessments will start from college readiness and work back to the elementary grades.

The Department of Education announced awards of some $330 million to two state coalitions – representing 44 states and the District of Columbia – for the design of new assessment systems aligned to the common-core standards. The grant money will be divided almost equally between the two applicants in the competition, which is part of Race to the Top. A third group of 12 states that applied for a smaller, $30 million pot under a separate but related competition to support specific exams at the high school level, failed to win an award

For-Profit College Spokesman Disputes Federal Regulation Attempt

The following was provided by Jorge Klor de Alva of the University of Phoenix, the largest for-profit university in the world.

American higher education is everywhere in the media today. Although it has long been a source of pride, critics today are assailing it in unprecedented fashion. Most agree it is too expensive for students, too costly for taxpayers, too ineffective in both retention and completion rates, and too unwilling to share data on itself so that it can be made more accountable.
But no part of higher education is being subjected to more intense scrutiny than the for-profit sector.

For-profit colleges and universities, the fastest growing segment of American higher education, are being accused by the media, the Department of Education, Wall Street’s short sellers, and Congress of deception, greed and a failure to comply with regulations. These accusations rest on only the barest of evidence, relying primarily on anecdotes. In fact, two Government Accountability Office studies this year, one covering thousands of schools since 1998, found only 37 for-profit institutions in violation of Departmental regulations. Despite this weak evidentiary base, the minimally supported charges have managed to shave billions of dollars off the market value of the stocks of the publicly held firms that own the largest colleges and universities, thereby leaving many Americans poorer as billions were lost by pension funds and 401k accounts. This situation, which some have called a “witch hunt,” is so clearly against the nation’s interest that I decided to focus Nexus’ inaugural study on it.

This study points to reasons why policy makers and legislators should step back from supporting some of the regulations proposed by the Department and the Senate HELP Committee. One such regulation, labeled “gainful employment,” is so potentially hazardous that it is not just likely to result in the exclusion of hundreds of thousands of students seeking to enroll in areas such as teaching, nursing, and public safety, but if it were applied to all institutions of higher education would remove so many programs from eligibility for federal financial aid that it could lead to the possible closure of 40% of community colleges, 90% of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and 45% of campuses where Hispanic students constitute more than 25% of the students.

By using the University of Phoenix as a case study, the document shows with specific data why the proposed regulatory reforms will end up doing more harm than good, undermining the only sector of higher education that can grow sufficiently to accommodate the millions of students the nation must educate to remain globally competitive-at no cost to taxpayers. At no cost because, as the study details, the interest students pay on their federal loans plus the taxes paid by the institutions are greater than the Pell Grants and all of the other government subsidies received by the students and the institutions. Consequently, in the absence of a robust for-profit sector helping the nation reach President Obama’s degree attainment goal of 2020, this goal will cost the nation nearly one trillion dollars.

Instead of regulations with such negative consequences, the study concludes with the importance of pursuing a reform of higher education focused on something that would truly benefit taxpayers, namely to require all institutions of higher education to measure the learning outcomes of their students and to publish those results regularly. Then at last taxpayers would have the data needed to distinguish good from bad performers, making for the efficient disbursement of local, state and federal education subsidies.

In summary, the accompanying document means to update anyone who is trying to make sense of how an Administration, whose explicit goal is to get everyone to attend at least one year of postgraduate instruction, is so intent on dismantling what has proven to be the most important and effective innovation in making access possible for the general public since the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 made access to practical higher education possible across the land.

About us: As an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, Nexus Research and Policy Center is organized to conduct educational research-such as in the fields of the learning sciences, assessment and measurement-and to prepare action-oriented analyses of pressing policy issues facing states and the nation regarding the improvement of educational efficiency, effectiveness and degree completion success, especially on behalf of underserved student populations and the institutions that provide them access to higher education. In particular, Nexus seeks to do research and promote policies that improve the for-profit education sector and that contribute to a better understanding between the for-profit and traditional sectors of higher education.

Sincerely,

Jorge Klor de Alva, President

Linking Secondary School Curriculum To College General Education

A new report alleges that most colleges lack a clear conception of general education-literature, composition, advanced foreign languages, math, science etc. Instead colleges offer a smorgasbord of disconnected and incoherent course requirements- see http://www.whatwilltheylearn.com

I am concerned that there is no general education program in college for secondary schools to align their curriculum with. AP helps with curriculum alignment for the top students, but there is nothing for the rest of the students.

With the exception of the common core curriculum program, there are no major efforts to provide curricular coherence and sequencing between the senior year and postsecondary education, and the role of the senior year in high school as a forum for general education is rarely discussed. Nor has anyone proposed a conception of liberal education that relates the academic content of the secondary schools to the first two years of college. Instead, students face an “eclectic academic muddle in Grades 10–14” (Orrill, 2000) until they select a college major. In Ernest Boyer’s metaphor, postsecondary general education is the “spare room” of the university, “the domain of no one in particular” whose many functions make it useless for any one purpose (Boyer and Levine, 1981). The functional “rooms,” those inhabited by faculty, are the departmental majors.

When attention is paid to general education, two contending theories predominate. One holds that the purpose of general education is to prepare students for a specialized major; the other, that the purpose of general education serves as an antidote to specialization, vocationalism, and majors. Clark (1993) hoped that somehow the specialized interests of the faculty could be arranged in interdisciplinary forms that would provide a framework for a coherent general education, but there is little evidence that this is happening.

In sum, the high school curriculum is unmoored from the freshman and sophomore college curriculum and from any continuous vision of liberal education. Policymakers for the secondary and postsecondary schools work in separate orbits that rarely interact, and the policy focus for K–16 has been more concerned with access to postsecondary education than with the academic preparation needed to complete a postsecondary degree or certificate. Access, rather than preparation, is also the theme of many of the professionals who mediate between the high schools and the colleges: high school counselors, college recruiters, and college admissions and financial aid officers.

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