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…

Many high school students enter college without the necessary reading, writing, and math skills and therefore must enroll in developmental courses (Barnett, 2018). To increase college readiness among entering students, one state encouraged community colleges to partner with local high schools to bring the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which…

Community colleges continue to increase their efforts to better serve students who enter their institutions with limited basic math, reading, or writing skills. In 2015, MDRC partnered with the Texas Coordinating Higher Education Board on a study to examine how colleges implemented state guidelines for students scoring below ninth-grade…

Many students who enter community college are deemed underprepared for college-level courses and are referred to developmental (remedial) education courses to build their math, reading, or writing skills. These students often struggle in developmental courses and in college more broadly. To help them, the City University of New York (CUNY)…

Anecdotal observations reveal that most students with strong arithmetic skills will succeed in the Beginning Algebra course even if they have no previous experience with algebra. In trying to quantify this with an initial teacher-created survey of arithmetic skills, it was observed, for three consecutive semesters, that students who scored in the…

Learning assessments of the First-Year Experience (FYE) at universities have drawn increasing attention. Despite its current popularity, few pieces of literature on the FYE learning assessment exist in Japan. To present a case of FYE in the context of Japan, this paper examines the FYE course called the Vision Planning Seminar (VPS) at the Nagoya…

Arts Council England (ACE) commissioned NFER to undertake the national evaluation of the In Harmony social and music education programme 2012-2015. In Harmony is funded by the Department for Education (DfE) and ACE, and is currently being piloted in six areas. The evaluation is investigating the range and extent of impacts on children, families,…

This field-based action research practicum investigated how students who have completed culinary training programs in Massachusetts public secondary schools perform in post-secondary coursework. The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has developed the Vocational Technical Education (VTE) Framework for Culinary Arts that outlines…

Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) was organized by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in partnership with The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to increase student learning in developmental--or basic skills--classes. However, their concern was not just the success of students in classes…

Studies student response to a developmental reading strategies course, in which students learned specific reading and study strategies with each chapter. Student questionnaires and follow-up phone calls indicated that students did use some of the strategies taught, but only the most basic. (AS)

An analysis of research on the effectiveness of developmental education is presented in this report. Chapter I highlights different perspectives on the role of developmental education at the college level; examines definitions and discusses the mission of developmental education; and puts forward a methodology for measuring its effectiveness.…

A pilot program was begun at the University of Southern Mississippi to measure the effect of a concentrated period of linguistic and communication skill development at the beginning of college for high risk students. The experiment was designed to follow an experimental group drawn carefully from the 15% of college freshmen with the lowest scores…

This report presents findings from the third of a series of studies of the Upward Bound (UB) program. The study was conducted between April, 1978, and September, 1979, to investigate long-term educational outcomes of UB program participation. The Upward Bound program was designed for low income high school students with potential for successfully…

A University of Auckland (Australia) program of developmental studies for students on academic probation provides four days of intensive instruction in time management, study habits, test preparation, test-taking, memory, concentration, and writing skills. Data show students taking the course improved significantly in their academic achievement…

The Prefreshman Summer Program for academically and economically handicapped students at the City University of New York (CUNY) was evaluated in 1985 and compared to previous evaluations. The voluntary, 6-week transitional program provides intensive basic skills instruction, tutoring, counseling, and financial aid to incoming students who fail to…