Developmental education has the mission of enabling underprepared students to acquire the capabilities necessary for college success. A growing number of research studies document its failure, however; specifically, approximately two thirds of community college students referred to a remedial mathematics sequence do not complete it. In response to…

In 2005 the Lumina Foundation awarded the Alamo Community College District (ACCD), including Palo Alto College, a grant to explore institutional effectiveness with a primary focus on serving student groups that traditionally have faced significant barriers to success. As a result of the award, ACCD staffed an umbrella initiative called "Achieving…

The nation is facing a crisis in its community colleges: more and more students are attending community colleges, but most of them are not prepared for college-level work. The problem may be most dire in mathematics. By most accounts, the majority of students entering community colleges are placed (based on placement test performance) into…

Every young person in the United States, whatever his or her background, wants to grow up to be economically self sufficient, to have a stable and productive career. So "college" is the aspiration for nearly 90 percent of high school seniors who say they will pursue some form of postsecondary education after high school, and nearly 66…

In 2007, the president of Shelton State Community College in Alabama announced that with more than 60% of incoming freshmen placing into developmental courses, the college had a moral and ethical obligation to provide top-quality opportunities for underprepared students. He appointed a team to investigate options for improving services and…

Nearly 60 percent of incoming community college students are unprepared for college-level work and must take at least one pre-college, "developmental" course, usually in math or English, before enrolling in any credit-bearing classes toward a degree. Within developmental education, students are most likely to need help with mathematics,…

Learning communities, a small cohort of students enrolled together in two or more linked courses, have become a popular intervention to help underprepared students succeed in college. Though learning communities abound in practice, the key structural feature of a learning community--the cohort--may not be fully understood. Authors posit that a…

The number of students attending higher education institutions has increased across the nation over the past few decades. Nearly 46% of students chose to begin postsecondary education or technical training at a community college (American Association of Community Colleges, 2008). Accessibility and lower tuition have contributed to the enrollment…

Enrolling more than 6 million students each fall, community colleges carry out a crucial function in higher education by providing access to college, including baccalaureate opportunities, occupational education, remedial education, and other educational services. At the same time, community colleges face great challenges that have elicited calls…

The New England Board of Higher Education (NEBHE), with support from Lumina Foundation, investigated whether the use of Khan Academy could increase community college student success in developmental math coursework, support embedded math content in technical courses, and prepare students to take or retake college placement tests. Khan Academy, an…

Quantway is a Carnegie Math Pathways initiative which redesigns the content, pedagogy, and structure of traditional developmental math courses to simultaneously tackle traditional barriers of student success and support a broader range of developmental students in achieving their math potential. Specifically, Quantway is a quantitative reasoning…

Transitioning Learners to Calculus in Community Colleges (TLC3) is a research project aimed at transforming institutional approaches to matriculating underrepresented racial minority (URM) students into and through Calculus II in the nation's 1,023 public associate degree-granting institutions (community colleges). The broader goal of the TLC3…

Community college students invest considerable time and money into attending college, but too few of them complete their programs of study. This paper discusses how the development of an overall framing vision for student success, the implementation of evidence-based practices, and the establishment of a culture that is both committed to student…

In this article, the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP) presents research that can inform policy and practice to improve student success at community colleges. Grounded in IHEP's mission of advancing college access and success for underserved students, the article shares lessons learned about the importance of data and transparency in…

In 2006, the National Center for Postsecondary Research, of which is MDRC is a partner, launched a demonstration of one-semester learning community programs at six colleges; five of these programs focused on developmental education. This is the final report from the project and includes findings from analyses that pool data across these five…