Developmental education programs and services have long provided underprepared and unprepared postsecondary students with the academic tools and life-management skills necessary to successfully complete collegelevel coursework. Legislation and policy changes, including implementing statewide minimum admissions requirements and restricting…

Low passing rates in developmental mathematics have been a serious concern for community colleges for many years. A course in Quantitative Literacy (QL) offers non-STEM students an alternative option to introductory algebra as a path to a degree. This paper describes the implementation and evolution of QL at the Borough of Manhattan Community…

Using a novel design approach, a randomized experiment (RE) was embedded within a regression discontinuity (RD) design (R-RE-D) to evaluate the impact of developmental mathematics at a large midwestern college ("n" = 2,122). Within a region of uncertainty near the cut-score, estimates of benefit from a prospective RE were closely…

In order to improve student success within developmental programs, we conducted a study of 1st year students taking required, developmental mathematics courses at a large, urban public university. Findings suggest that merely the number of years of mathematics that students take in high school is not a precise indicator of student readiness and…

Objective: This article examines the effectiveness of remediation for community college students who are identified as having the lowest skills in math. Method: We use transcript data from a state community college system and take advantage of a regression discontinuity design that compares statistically identical students who are assigned to the…

The purpose of this study was to determine which academic and affective student factors were significant to student success in a mastery learning program in developmental mathematics and to determine if the mastery learning program led to increased mathematical knowledge retention and success in the subsequent math course. The first phase of the…

A lack of college readiness can affect student success in the classroom and impact retention rates. It has been recommended that all students be placed in courses with college-level content but that added support be provided for students identified as underprepared. This study examines the impact of added instructional time and support embedded…

Little is known about the importance of instructional quality in American higher education because few recent studies have had access to direct measures of student learning that are comparable across sections of the same course. Using data from two developmental algebra courses at a large community college, I found that student learning varies…

There is a growing view that students who enroll in developmental courses are less successful in completing their programs than non-developmental students. Nevertheless, even though developmental students as a group ultimately might not be as academically successful as non-developmental students, many of them might still derive benefit from taking…

In a diverse classroom, there are students who are in need of both mathematics and English as a second language instruction. One of the challenges faced at Lake Washington Institute of Technology (LWIT) was the development of a pathway for English language learners into core academic courses at the college. In addition, English language learners…

Less than half of the students in the United States graduate from high school and are ready to take college-level math courses. Many years and varieties of remedial math programs have failed to dramatically improve outcomes, especially at scale. The question we face is whether technology in general, and open educational resources in particular,…

This paper reports that the student population enrolled in remedial mathematics is rapidly increasing, while funding for these classes in Florida is declining. The Math Department at the Winter Park Campus (WPC) of Florida's Valencia Community College (VCC) has developed a curriculum that offers a variety of instructional formats to its remedial…

Due to the large number of students requiring developmental college math courses, a study was conducted to determine if a beginning algebra course focusing on function and integrating technology as a tool to explore mathematics would aid students with previously debilitating experiences in math. The study evaluated 92 students enrolled in…