While most community colleges admit all students who apply for admission, the vast majority have required students to demonstrate specified levels of literacy and numeracy before they can take college-level courses. Typically, students have been assessed using a single placement test, such as the College Board's ACCUPLACER. Colleges--or sometimes…

California is projected to fall 1.1 million bachelor's degrees short of economic demand by 2030. Expanding access to higher education could help shrink the gap, but California also needs to boost the likelihood that students who enroll in college will stay on track to earn degrees. The share of adults with bachelor's degrees is slightly larger in…

This report is focused on both introducing corequisite support to institutional leaders looking for new approaches to addressing remediation and offering new insights that can deepen practice for those who are already at work implementing the model. Following previous reports on the corequisite model, "No Room for Doubt" outlines a…

A startling number of students arrive at the doors of colleges and universities lacking the essential skills and knowledge required to succeed there. If given the proper tools and supports, the great majority of these students would be able to achieve their goals in and outside of the classroom. But most of them are shuttled off to developmental…

Katie Hern is an English Instructor at Chabot College and Co-Founder of the California Acceleration Project (CAP), a professional development network that supports the state's 113 community colleges to transform remediation and increase student completion and equity. Hern speaks nationally on remediation reform and integrated reading and writing.…

Nearly two-thirds of students require some form of remediation before taking college-level classes, and community colleges have become increasingly important in providing this education. Unfortunately, relatively few students complete the developmental courses required to make a transition to college-level work. Based on a three-year study of over…

In its current form, developmental education may be one of the largest impediments to success in California's community colleges. Each year, hundreds of thousands of students are deemed underprepared for college and placed into developmental (also known as remedial or basic-skills) courses. Yet most never earn a degree or certificate, or transfer…

This document presents the technical appendix that accompanies the full report, "Preparing Students for Success in California's Community Colleges." The appendix includes Data and Methods. [Supported with funding from the Sutton Family Fund. For the full report, see ED570976.]

The developmental program at Los Angeles City College, designed six years ago for those with low likelihood of success, has been regularly up-dated as needed. For the past two years, counselor assistants and student tutors have helped the regular faculty. In 1968, student tutors were assigned to help students, both regular and developmental, in…

Developmental education, also termed remedial education, refers to curricula intended to improve the academic skills and knowledge of students who are underprepared for undergraduate coursework, particularly in the areas of mathematics, reading, and writing. Many practitioners and researchers agree that developmental education should be improved,…

A significant challenge in higher education is to narrow the educational attainment gap between academically prepared and unprepared students. To this end, developmental or remedial education is intended to improve the academic skills and knowledge of students who are unprepared for undergraduate coursework, particularly in the areas of…

In recent years, developmental education in the community colleges has received much attention. However, there has been little research examining the relationship between course length and course success in developmental education. Using historical enrollment data from a large, suburban community college in southern California, this study examines…

IN SUMMER 1967, ALL ENTERING STUDENTS WHO SCORED BELOW THE 11TH PERCENTILE ON THE BAKERSFIELD COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION, SCAT, AND ENGLISH CLASSIFICATION TEST WERE GIVEN ADDITIONAL READING, ARITHMETIC, AND GROUP NONVERBAL INTELLIGENCE TESTS. FROM THIS GROUP, 27 VOLUNTEERS WERE CHOSEN TO PARTICIPATE IN A 6-WEEK, 4-HOUR DAILY PROGRAM OF REMEDIAL…

Community college stakeholders are searching with increasing urgency for approaches with the potential to improve the success rates for community college students, particularly those in need of developmental education. "Learning communities," which place cohorts of students together in two or more courses for one semester, are a popular…

The Learning Communities Demonstration is a national research project that is testing the effectiveness of learning communities in six community colleges across the United States: Merced College in California; The Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in Baltimore, Maryland; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, Florida; Houston…