This chapter describes the structure and implementation of a redesign of developmental education in the Virginia Community College System, discusses preliminary descriptive findings from an evaluation of the redesign, and shares lessons for the field.

This chapter discusses the importance of scrutinizing the outcomes of developmental education reforms across race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and level of developmental need.

This resource, released in collaboration with the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness, explains the importance of developmental education, its current challenges and how policymakers can contribute to improving outcomes.

Adult proficiency in numeracy in the United States lags that of other developed nations, and the nonselective institutions that dominate the higher education sector struggle to address the learning needs of the sizeable proportion of students who enroll in their institutions and are deemed academically underprepared in mathematics. Research on…

This issue of "Inside Out," a publication of Community College Research Center's (CCRC's) Scaling Innovation project, explores how developmental education reforms can create opportunities for faculty to engage in professional learning related to instruction. The authors present a case study at Fullerton College, where the process of…

This paper uses qualitative and quantitative data to compare the outcomes of students at Chabot College who participated in an accelerated, one-semester developmental English course and their peers who participated in a two-semester sequence. The sample included first-time students who entered college between summer 1999 and fall 2010; students…

Acceleration, which involves the reorganization of instruction and curricula in ways that facilitate the completion of academic requirements in an expedited manner, is an increasingly popular strategy at community colleges for improving the outcomes of developmental education students. This paper reviews the literature on acceleration and…

Mounting evidence suggests that the traditional sequence of developmental education courses hinders community college students from entering college-level coursework and ultimately earning a credential. For example, using data from colleges participating in the Achieving the Dream initiative, an analysis by Bailey, Jeong, and Cho (2010) found that…

Originally designed for students who test into at least two levels of developmental education in a particular subject area, FastStart is a compressed course program model launched in 2005 at the Community College of Denver (CCD). The program combines multiple semester-length courses into a single intensive semester, while providing case…