Background/Context: Accelerated instructional strategies for developmental education have been promoted as a way to help underprepared students to progress more quickly through college-level coursework. Yet, what remains unknown is whether certain accelerated strategies are more effective than others and whether this initial acceleration may lead…

Developmental interventions for reading and writing often take place at community colleges during the winter or summer. These brief, intersession workshops are examples of compressed acceleration, as they give students the opportunity to exit developmental coursework and enroll in credit bearing courses the following semester. As college readiness…

As online education gains popularity among both learners and postsecondary institutions, there is a movement toward identifying ways to promote student success. Over half of all higher education institutions offer online classes, due in part to the ease of offering and scheduling (Hoffman, 2006); educators seek ways to identify any demographic or…

This article discusses service-learning as a teaching strategy that can enhance and improve learning outcomes for students in developmental education, increase civic engagement, and aid in student persistence and completion.

We pilot tested an identity-based relevance-writing intervention designed to support developmental community college students' (N = 54) educational commitment, value, and persistence. The intervention was embedded within regular journal assignments in two study skills courses with a third section serving as a comparison group. The intervention…

Objective/Research Question: How do student- and school-level factors measured in the final year of high school contribute to the odds of a student being assessed to need remediation in Math during the students' first community college enrollment? Methods: The present study draws on five years of linked secondary and post-secondary administrative…

We examine the impact of remedial and developmental courses on college students with varying levels of academic preparedness, thus focusing on a wider range of students than previous studies. Using a regression discontinuity design, we provide causal estimates of the effects of placement in different levels of remedial courses on short-,…

Over half of community college students place into developmental education, resulting in significant financial costs. We extend previous research demonstrating that using placement tests to assign students into developmental courses results in frequent misplacement. We use Florida data to explore the extent to which students are misplaced into…

Community college developmental math students (N = 657) from three math levels were asked to place five whole numbers on a line that had only endpoints 0 and 20 marked. How the students placed the numbers revealed the same three stages of behavior that Steffe and Cobb (1988) documented in determining young children's number sense. 23% of the…

Developmental mathematics pass rates at Delaware Technical Community College (DTCC) have remained the same or decreased for a number of years despite two different math curriculum redesigns. They hover around 50 percent or below at each campus, even after the implementation of a second redesign this past Fall 2016 semester. The first redesign…

As part of a study (Armstrong, Stahl, & Kantner, 2015a, 2015b, 2016) of curricular alignment between developmental reading (DR) and introductory-level general education (GE) at one community college, we asked faculty participants about the DR coursework at their own institution. Throughout data analysis, we became interested in how non-DR…

Texas is taking a multipronged approach to improving developmental education delivery and increasing student success rates by aggressively pursuing programmatic, research, and instructional strategies that will boost college completion and help reach labor market goals. Texas higher education has committed itself to providing improved and more…

This study examined one strategy for dev-ed math reform, the Dana Center Math Pathways (DCMP) model. The DCMP model encouraged students to enroll in a college-level math course best suited to their field of interest and, at the time of inquiry, used a compression approach, condensing sequences of two or more developmental courses into a shorter,…

In 2015, Bergen Community College (BCC) received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education First in the World Grant Program. The grant entitled Alternatives to Mathematics Education: An Unprecedented Program (AMP-UP), was awarded to conduct a randomized control trial on a corequisite approach to developmental math education. This study was…

Over half of community college students place into developmental education, resulting in significant financial costs. We extend previous research demonstrating that using placement tests to assign students into developmental courses results in frequent misplacement. We use Florida data to explore the extent to which students are misplaced into…