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…

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…

Developmental English (DE) has been under fire from critics who think it acts as a barrier rather than as a support to the success of students placing into DE. In Texas, such pressures led to a wave of reforms and changes affecting delivery and structure of DE instruction. This dissertation draws on years of internal data at one community college…

The purpose of this quantitative, non-experimental, cross-sectional, ex-post facto data study was to examine factors related to community college students who enrolled in developmental English and/or enrolled in combined developmental English and reading courses persistence and engagement at urban community colleges. The dependent variables…

Students identified as unprepared for college work face considerable barriers to performance and college completion. To improve underprepared student outcomes, community colleges where most underprepared students enroll are using different models of developmental education. A recently implemented model in mathematics is a corequisite course…

Developmental courses in community colleges often leave students unprepared, demeaned, and uninspired. These gatekeeper courses need reform, especially in terms of curriculum and instruction. One framework -- Dr. Gholdy Muhammed's Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) -- could be useful for developmental courses and students. HRL is a teaching…

Research on developmental education reform has given surprisingly limited attention to what happens inside the classroom between faculty and students. Our qualitative study used interview data from 20 faculty and 20 students in corequisite math and English courses at one of the nation's largest and most racially diverse community college systems.…

The first-year experiences of six African American male students participating in a developmental education program at a community college were examined. African American male students constitute a significant proportion of those who struggle with academic performance. The initial year of college can be challenging for African American males,…

This research attempted to determine whether faculty instructors' employment status played a role in the success of students who are not college ready. The purpose of this study was to determine whether developmental English faculty instructors' employment status had an effect on grades in a freshman composition course (English 101) among…

The corequisite support model is a promising developmental education reform effort that is helping students transition into college-level coursework more quickly. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on the critical leadership that has enhanced student success in corequisite courses and hold promise in enhancing equity within developmental…

A significant number of students enter community colleges with developmental education (DE) needs in reading, writing, and mathematics. Many of these students are typically referred to more than one level of DE courses before they can enroll in a college-level course. This has led to lower than desired success rate of DE students over the years.…

This study examined how community college students' reflective sentiments about learning with the Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) ALEKS evolved in three developmental pre-Algebra Mathematics courses and how students' sentiments related to their metacognitive awareness and learning performance. Thirty-nine students participated in this study.…

The purpose of this quantitative research study was to describe and compare Black community college students' perceptions of engagement. The sample used in this study was 114 students in an online developmental mathematics class at a historically Black community college (HBCC). The study was based on the theoretical framework of Moore's model and…

Supporting Strategic Writers (SSW) is an instructional approach and curriculum for college developmental English and integrated reading and writing courses. SSW is based on strategy instruction integrated with practices common in college English. Students learn strategies for writing and critical reading of sources based on rhetorical analysis and…