This dissertation examined how adult learners who took developmental mathematics in a community college and passed the courses, viewed their self-efficacy and the roles they felt self-efficacy had on their successful completion of mathematics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adult learners in two U.S. community colleges.…

Beginning in 2019, California community colleges were required to use multiple measures to determine students' placement into initial math courses. Community colleges also created structured BSTEM and liberal arts (SLAM) math pathways beginning in 2017. This contemporaneous implementation could reproduce racialized stratification in math…

The author examines the process for applying for National Association for Development Education (NADE) accreditation. The multi-year process began when the English faculty of the community college she works at reviewed data from the National Community College Benchmark Project. The data showed low success rates and poor persistence from…

The completion of developmental community college (DCC) courses is a crucial step in community college education to reach the national goal of increasing college success. DCC students are a unique population who require specific strategies such as vocabulary retention (VR) to achieve academic success. Prior research on vocabulary has been limited…

We estimate the cost effectiveness of corequisite English developmental education at community colleges compared with a traditional prerequisite pathway. Our context is a previously published randomized controlled trial that estimated the effects of three different approaches to English corequisites implemented in five Texas community colleges.…

Critical race theory (CRT) continues to push a hot button within education. In higher education, these discussions often center 4-year colleges and universities, leaving community colleges out of the conversation. On top of that, developmental mathematics remains a racialized impediment for students from minoritized backgrounds. In this article,…

In the United States, students often graduate from high school unprepared to succeed in college. In Alabama, fewer than 25% of high school graduates are college ready. Frequently, unprepared students enroll in community colleges, which are tasked to help them transfer to a four-year institution or to enter the workforce. However, students who need…

This article considers recent trends in developmental education and analyzes disaggregated student data, exploring the extent to which developmental education reform of corequisite instruction affected access of one community college's students to a first-semester composition course. By examining student access and student success across two…

The Post-Traditional Remedial Learner in higher education is a student constituency that has historically been "Hidden in Plain Sight" and strikingly absent from substantive discussions that foreground their lived experiences, relevance, and success in post-secondary education. Though physically present on campus and numerically…

Students in developmental math classes have been documented to struggle with arithmetic. This dissertation research was a response to the calls in the literature to qualitatively understand what students are learning in a classroom. Number sequences have been well researched to document the connection of student understanding of math in elementary…

Faced with many applicants with very low math skills, community colleges are responding with a variety of reforms, including restricting developmental courses to students with high-school-level skills. This brief provides context for the policy changes and describes the alternatives two colleges offer to those who don't make the cut. [This brief…

In response to concerns about the additional costs and time-to-degree associated with traditional developmental education programs, several states and postsecondary systems have implemented corequisite reform where academically underprepared students take both a developmental education course and college-level course in the same subject area…

Drawing on qualitative data collected in a sample of colleges as part of a larger study on the implementation and impact of AB 705 in California, this paper explores the rollout of corequisite reforms, focusing on the use of embedded tutors in introductory math and English courses as a strategy to meet to the needs of students. This paper…

Researchers, organizations, companies, non-profits, practitioners, and to some extent, the public, are clamoring for massive reform in developmental coursework in higher education (American Association of Community Colleges, 2018; Edgecombe et al., 2014; Complete College America, 2012). One such reform is the push for integrated reading and…

Two-year colleges provide access and opportunity for students with various academic backgrounds to pursue a post-secondary education. While two-year colleges take pride in admitting any student with a high school diploma or equivalent, in recent years colleges have been under scrutiny for low completion and graduation rates. Particular attention…