While most community colleges admit all students who apply for admission, the vast majority have required students to demonstrate specified levels of literacy and numeracy before they can take college-level courses. Typically, students have been assessed using a single placement test, such as the College Board's ACCUPLACER. Colleges--or sometimes…

Despite evidence suggesting that standardized tests are an imperfect measure of academic readiness, many community colleges across the country rely on them alone to determine student course placement. However, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced campuses to transition to remote operations in spring 2020, proctoring in-person placement tests became…

Early alert systems have promised to be an integral component of a student success solution. The purpose of this quantitative study was to examine the relationship between the use of the early alert system and persistence for students taking developmental education courses and students taking college-level courses in the Virginia Community College…

Afterschool and competency-based learning are increasingly emerging as student-centered, supportive learning models to prepare students for college and career. This white paper explores the intersection and relationship between these two fields, recommends ideal policy environments for implementing successful programs, provides real-world…

In corequisite models of instruction, marginally prepared students are placed directly into college-level coursework, taught with a paired support course. Initial research suggests that such models yield significant improvements in the number of students passing credit-level mathematics when compared to previous models of prerequisite remediation.…

As community colleges across the country look for ways to promote student success, the need for scaling effective approaches is critical. This guide builds on a framework of four phases of scaling developed in Job For the Future's (JFF's) previous publication, "Thinking Big: A Framework for States on Scaling Up Community College…

Many students enter higher education with poor preparation for college mathematics courses. These students are often placed through high-stakes placement testing into developmental coursework that bear no credit towards graduation, but many students who begin in developmental coursework never succeed in a college-level mathematics course. Recent…

This chapter describes the structure and implementation of a redesign of developmental education in the Virginia Community College System, discusses preliminary descriptive findings from an evaluation of the redesign, and shares lessons for the field.

In the Emporium Model (EM), students work toward mastery thresholds using commercial instructional software in a computer lab staffed with instructors. This qualitative case study uses classroom observations and interviews to describe instruction and student behavior in EM classrooms for developmental mathematics at one college in the Virginia…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of community college presidents regarding developmental education. A mixed method sampling technique combining convenience and purposeful sampling was used to identify five presidents in North Carolina and three presidents in Virginia to participate in the study. Results of…

Student attrition has been a significant challenge facing higher education for decades and is particularly pronounced within community colleges. Specifically, first-time postsecondary students only experienced a 59.3 percent retention rate between Fall 2013 and Fall 2014; at two-year colleges, less than half (46.9 percent) of students were…

Southern Regional Education Board's (SREB's) Commission on Career and Technical Education challenges states to build bridges from high school to postsecondary attainment and career advancement by developing rigorous, relevant career pathways that align secondary, postsecondary, and workplace learning and lead to high-skill, high-wage jobs in…

Virginia Highlands Community College (VHCC) implemented MTH 155 -- Statistical Reasoning Co-Requisite -- in the spring semester of 2018. MTH 155 replaced MTH 146 on VHCC's campus. Prerequisites for this course are the first five developmental MTE modules. The intended co-requisite audience for this new course consists of students having…

The Developmental Strategies for College Readiness and Success Resource Guide was produced by the Education Commission of the States and the Southern Regional Education Board for the "Countdown to 2015: Developmental Strategies to Advance Readiness in the Common Core Era" convening held April 21-23, 2014 in Charlotte, North Carolina. The…

Developmental education has been examined from the perspective of students, college instructors, administrators, and policy-makers. However, the perspectives of one important stakeholder group--high school teachers--has not been included in the research literature on this topic. The purpose of this study was to allow teachers to be heard on the…