At two-year public community colleges, the 2011 three-year persistence rate was 23.9%. From 1988 to 2006, between 40% and 60% of all first-time community college students were referred to and enrolled in at least one developmental education course. More students begin college underprepared in mathematics than any other subject area, and only about…

Developmental education courses in college--defined as classes taken in college that are below college level (Bautsch, 2013)--have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Concerns focus on the large number of students enrolled in developmental education courses, the high cost of providing them, and the low success rates among students who…

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…

Over the period 2010-14 more than 80 percent of public high school graduates in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands were placed in non-credit-bearing developmental English courses and more than 92 percent were placed in developmental math courses when they enrolled at Northern Marianas College, the commonwealth's only public…

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…

The purpose of this quantitative quasi-experimental study is to determine the effectiveness of a corequisite delivery model for developmental math students at a 4-year public institution. Nationally, close to fifty percent of incoming college students are placed in non-credit bearing remedial courses (Complete College America, 2012). Students must…

Many students graduate from high school academically unprepared for college. When such students enroll in college as first-time freshmen, they are commonly placed in non-credit-bearing developmental English and math courses to develop the skills necessary to complete freshman-level credit-bearing courses. Understanding students' college readiness…

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…

This research analyzed linked high-quality state data from K-12, adult education, and postsecondary state datasets in order to better understand the association between student demographics and successful completion of a postsecondary program. Due to the relatively small sample size compared to the large number of features, we analyzed the data…

This article contributes to the empirical literature on remediation in community colleges by using policy variation across North Carolina's community colleges to examine how remediation affects various outcomes for traditional-age college students. We find that being required to take a remedial course (as we define it in this article) either in…

Students at a large urban community college enrolled in fourteen sections of a developmental algebra class. While cognitive variables are often used to place students, affective characteristics may also influence their success. To explore the impact of affective variables, students took ACT's Engage survey measuring motivation, academic-related…

For the past 10 years, government reports have documented an increase in college developmental reading courses. However, a community college in the southeastern United States has experienced a decline in enrollment and attendance in these courses since they began in 1999. The purpose of this study was to determine (a) the impact of taking a…

Student retention rates in higher education have been a focus of study for decades, yet the problem of low student retention still exists, particularly among community college students. While student retention has not been empirically investigated among community college students in language courses, the specific problem of low course-level…

This research examined differences in causal attributions and an exam score in a developmental mathematics course based on student classification: traditional, minimally nontraditional, moderately nontraditional, and highly nontraditional as well as grade and gender among nontraditional students. Statistical analysis revealed significant…