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,…

Comal County, Texas, may be rural but its students face many of the same challenges as students in urban districts. Communities In Schools of South Central Texas works with the local school district to identify student needs and provide critical supports to help young people prepare for life after high school.

The Office of Correctional Education was created through an Act of Congress in 1991 to oversee and coordinate prison education programs as a way to reduce recidivism (Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act, 1990). However, correctional education completion rates are extremely low. Therefore, we used secondary data from the…

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

With the high number of students entering higher education who need developmental math coursework, it is imperative that institutions evaluate their developmental math programs. This study explored the instructor dispositional traits and pedagogy that students found aided or would have aided in their success in these courses. A sample of students…

This chapter identifies some of the challenges surrounding data collection and analysis regarding development students, including testing and identifying academic needs, placement determination, and measuring student outcomes.

Many students enter higher education with poor preparation for college mathematics courses. These students are often placed through high-stakes placement testing into developmental coursework that bear no credit towards graduation, but many students who begin in developmental coursework never succeed in a college-level mathematics course. Recent…

Counterstory, an analytical tool of Critical Race Theory, was used in this dissertation to foreground the voices of four young Black men completing a non-credit bearing developmental or remedial mathematics (DevRemMath) course at Suburban Community College (SCC). This study presents young Black men's first-person perspectives about the conditions…

This Policy Brief captures some of the challenges for students' math education trajectories, in light of the coronavirus pandemic, and it highlights three ways states can strengthen math pathways to improve student access and success. Specific policy options that states can consider include: (1) aligning high school math courses with postsecondary…

English Learners (ELs) attend community colleges at a greater rate than four-year schools, making community colleges primary sites of ESL education in American higher education. These institutions' recent embrace of the corequisite structure -- a pairing of a non-credit developmental course with a credit-bearing disciplinary content course in…

This qualitative study investigated co-requisite courses which pair a developmental course with a college-level course and offer insight into how co-requisite instructors adjusted their curriculum and pedagogy for English language learners. Specifically, it examined faculty experiences teaching a co-requisite course combining a critical thinking…

Students taking developmental mathematics often need academic support to succeed in their courses, but also benefit from support in adapting to university life. In this paper we describe our experience in developing, implementing, and evaluating a peer mentoring program for developmental mathematics students at a large research university that…

Emerging practices in both K-12 and higher education hold great promise in the establishment of equity frameworks. The use of finely disaggregated data, the effort to track additional student groups, and related work, all help to establish policies and tools to monitor the impact of reform efforts to address inequities. State programs and…

In October 2022, the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR) released a systematic review of evaluation literature on developmental education reforms to identify interventions found to have positive effects on student outcomes entitled, "Five Principles for Developmental Education: A Review of the Evidence" (see…