Identifying and supporting high-risk students are critical to increasing retention and persistence. What makes some high-risk students able to succeed, while others attrit? This article argues that early success in college courses is a key factor in resilience among high-risk students. Enrolling students in skill-appropriate courses during their…

Every year, millions of college students are referred to developmental courses (also called remedial courses). Success rates in these courses are low: Fewer than half of developmental students pass the course sequences to which they were referred. Being referred to developmental education is also highly correlated with dropping out of college.…

Despite substantial cross-national interest in remedial programming as a way to support low-achieving students, evidence of its effectiveness is rare, particularly in low-income and/or crisis-affected contexts. In this article, we present experimental evidence of the impact of a remedial tutoring program on academic outcomes from a two-level…

The problem addressed in this study was the absence of a clearly defined pathway to Composition I for Hispanic non-native English-speaking students (HNNESS) testing below college level English at the study site. The purpose of the study was to identify an optimal pre-college English pathway for HNNESS using the college assessment of basic skills…

A recent study found that one in three Americans between the ages of 16 and 65 lack the skills needed to succeed in middle school math, let alone math at the high school or college level. In some instances, states or colleges have raised standards for developmental courses and routed students who score below the minimum skill level for…

Academic language proficiency, particularly academic writing, appears to be significantly related to academic achievement. The aim of the present study is to explore the relationship between written language proficiency and academic achievement, and to investigate the effects of a remedial academic writing programme. Academic writing was assessed…

This study explored how developmental students enrolled at the TTIOO community college experienced the resident developmental advising service. Emphasis was placed on ascertaining how these students perceived the role of developmental advising in enabling them to develop self-regulated behaviors inclusive of goal-setting skills and academic…

Every year, millions of new college students come academically underprepared. They lack the necessary skills to perform at the college level. Postsecondary institutions address this problem with extensive remedial programs (Chen, 2016). One of these remedial programs is reading. In several postsecondary institutions, students are required to pass…

Transition to College and Careers was a two-year demonstration project that addressed both academic and non-academic barriers to college for adult learners. Of the 397 adult learners who enrolled in one of the six participating programs, 66% completed it, 69% attained college level reading skills, and the majority enrolled in college afterwards.…

The search for assessment procedures that are more fair and useful have led to the investigation of alternatives to traditional forms of intellectual assessment. This study explored an alternative which combined a dynamic assessment approach with the Planning, Attention, Simultaneous and Successive Processing (PASS) model of cognitive processing.…