Research Studies

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Why only the "outstanding" college students receive slate mobile computers?

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I just read an announcement about the University of Southern Mississippi was handing out 1,000 slate computers to their "outstanding" students. [Click to read the online article.] The curious thing about the plan was to only share them with "outstanding" students defined as those from the Honors College, McNair Scholars Program, and Southern Style leadership group.

The article states "Tablets are like the Swiss Army Knife to academic excellence. By leveraging this new technology, we are committed to transforming the way students interact, engage and learn in the classrooms," said Homer Coffman, CIO at Southern Miss, in a statement released today. "The iTech department at Southern Miss is continually challenging itself to support emerging technology and find new ways to put information into the students' hands."

With such a great technology, why not the "average" students or targeting those that are facing academic challenges in a class or two? Why not for students who do not have a mobile device, perhaps due to low income? The college I work at provides an iPad for all first-year students enrolled in the College of Education and Human Development. [Click to read the press release.\ Results look promising. We are repeating the distribution this year at no cost to the students. Preliminary from the instructors in more than 30 classes report favorable positive resutls from the students and the faculty members who enhanced their classroom learning enviroinment.  It was also good to know that everyone in the classroom had an effective mobile computer and bridged the "digital divide" due to income restrictions and social capital that some students have and others do not.

Congrats to the University of Southern Mississippi for their bold decision to distribute the 1,000 tablet computers. Please consider more inclusion with next year's program to those who are not quite as outstanding as others (yet). Maybe the mobile devices could help propel more students to that category. Outstanding students probably have more social capital than others. Let's see what happens when more resources are provided to those who might need the resource more.

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The Community College and Remedial/Developmental Education

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Recently the Gates Foundation announced a gift of over $100 million to support community colleges in identifying best practices to improve remedial and developmental-level courses and other services to support higher student achievement and graduation rates. The following interview forecast many of these recommendations by Robert McCabe a decade ago. Revisiting McCabe and reading his book provides best practices and case studies of success with increasing student success.

Callan, P. M. (2000, Fall). An interview: Robert McCabe. National Crosstalk, Retrieved July 4, 2004, from: http://www.highereducation.org/crosstalk/ct1000/interview1000.shtml

Robert McCabe, senior fellow with the League for Innovation in the Community College and former president of Miami-Dade Community College is the focus of this interview. Much of the interview revolves around McCabe's newest book, No One to Waste, a national study of community college remedial programs. McCabe employs a variety of arguments for the support and expansion of remedial education.

ERIC Database, ED448813, Title: No One To Waste: A Report to Public Decision-Makers and Community College Leaders. Authors: McCabe, Robert H. Abstract: Twenty-five community colleges participated in a study that tracked 71 percent of 592 students who successfully enrolled in a remedial program in 1990. Follow-up interviews of program completers gathered information about further education, employment, family, and facts about post-remedial life. A criminal justice search was also conducted on the entire study cohort. These data were the basis for this first comprehensive national study on community college remedial education students. The study found that most successfully remediated students perform well in standard college work, gravitate to occupational programs or direct employment, and become productively employed. While a majority of the remedial students were white non-Hispanic, ethnic minorities were overrepresented in the cohort and even more so in a seriously deficient student sub-cohort, confirming that remedial education is a significant issue for ethnic minorities. While community college remedial programs are cost effective, most colleges fail to use the substantial research concerning successful remedial education, and do not fund programs at a level necessary for successful results. Recommendations include: (1) giving remedial education higher priority and greater institutional and legislative support; (2) requiring assessment and placement of all entering students; and (3) developing a national guide to assist colleges in developing effective remedial education programs. (Contains 15 figures and tables, 45 references and 63 pages.)/p>

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Gates Foundations Commits $110M to Reform Traditional Remedial and Developmental Education

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(Gates Foundation Press Release) To aid community colleges in developmental education reform, the foundation announced a commitment of up to $110 million to help research and scale innovative programs. These strategies will help under-prepared students spend less time and money catching up, and will lead to improved retention and completion. About half of the foundation’s commitment has already been given to colleges and programs. The remaining $57 million will be given as grants over the next two years and will be guided by lessons learned through the earlier investments, which are showing that good remedial education contains several key elements:

  • It starts early with effective collaboration between middle schools, high schools and colleges that can prevent the need for remediation in the first place. For example, El Paso Community College partners with local school districts and the University of Texas at El Paso, which has dramatically improved graduation rates in just a few short years.

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  • It is tightly structured blending credit-bearing classes with enhanced academic supports. For example, Washington state’s I-BEST program blends basic academics and career training into a seamless accelerated program.

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  • It’s flexible and personalized to address specific skill gaps to ensure that students learn what they need. This can be accomplished through technology and other means to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of remedial education. Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, for example, will fund the development of remedial math courses that will be made available for free to colleges. The project aims to reduce the time and cost of remediation through interactive and adaptive multimedia and games.
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$100 Billion Invested and Only One USDOE Validated Practice

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I was curious how much money had been invested in TRIO programs by the federal government since the 1960s. I found a table on the Internet, http://tinyurl.com/TRIOfundinghistoryThe total is about $16 billion through FY10 and they still don't have any validated best practices by external evaluation agencies. Add to this all the money that has been spent on GEAR UP, Adult Education, Title III, Title IV, etc. Since some of those programs were created by the original Higher Education Act, the total by all of them together probably exceeds $100 billion. Maybe a lot more. And only one validated postsecondary practice by USDOE (Supplemental Instruction).

Millions of students are served every year by these federal programs. Many students benefit from the services. However, the USDOE does not have a mechanism to identify why they work. Or what particular policies, specific activities, and the like make the differernce for higher outcomes. TRIO, Title III, GEAR UP, and other federal programs are not themselves best practices. An individual college makes a selection from a wide variety of policies and activities to craft their own approach to better serving students. Those individual choices and the way that they are implemented could be "best practices." But currently there is no where to find such best practices that have been validated by USDOE.

USDOE used to have the Program Effectiveness Panel (PEP) that evaluated education practices at the secondary and postsecondary level. Only one program at the postsecondary level was validated regarding improved student achievement and graduation rates. PEP was eliminagted in the mid 1990s due to budget cuts imposed by the administration of President Clinton.

Every year the U.S. Department of Education awards close to $2 billion for grants to colleges to support high student achievement and graduation rates. But there is currently no system for identifying, validating, and disseminating best practices for postsecondary education. Every year colleges are forced to reinvent the wheel regarding education practices to serve those students. This is an enormous waste of the taxpayer's dollars and lower outcomes for students. We need a onestop shop for college administrators to locate validated best practices that they know will work rather than experimenting on their own students to see if something works. If it does not, the students suffer. if it does work, no one else knows about it. This has to stop. If we ever hope to raise the achievement of U.S. college students to be the best in the world, we will have to make ourselves accountable for those federal funds and effectively share best practices with one another. 

USDOE 2008 Digest of Education Statistics

USDOE just released the 2008 Digest of Education Statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009020.pdf It is quite a referencee guide spanning more than 700 pages. I was curious about offerings of developmental-level courses at different types of U.S. postsecondary institutions. That table is found on page 469. USDOE still uses old language when describing these courses. They use the term "remedial" rather than "developmental". While such courses are nearly universal at all public community colleges. However, the percent of public four year colleges has declined by more than 10 percentage points over the past decade. As more public, four-year institutions seek to improve their standings through external rating services and they also engage in "mission differentiation" to establish a niche for themselves, more and more of them are eliminating developmental-level courses with the hope that students will begin their career at a community college that offers the needed courses and then perhaps transfer to the senior institution later. There was the time when most postsecondary institutions sought to be comprehensive and nearly all of them offered remedial and developmental-level courses for all their students. That is a part of the history of U.S. higher educaton that is too often overlooked and underreported.

One-third of recent PA Students Enroll in Developmental-Level Courses

One third of freshmen enter Pennsylvania’s two-year and four-year public colleges not prepared for college-level math or English and require remedial work to catch up, at a cost to the state of $26 million a year, according to a report released Wednesday by Pennsylvania’s education secretary. This is consistent with USDOE studies that document that about one-third of entering college students enroll in one or more developmental-level courses. Gerald L. Zahorchak cited the report as evidence of the need for statewide high school graduation requirements. The full press release is available by clicking on the following web link, http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-21-2009/0004958243&EDAT

Referral, Enrollment, and Completion in Developmental Education Sequences in Community Colleges

Referral, Enrollment, and Completion in Developmental Education Sequences in Community Colleges (Working Paper No. 15) By: Thomas Bailey, Dong Wook Jeong & Sung-Woo Cho — December 2008. New York: Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University. To download the entire report, click on the following link, http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=652 After being assessed, many students entering community colleges are referred to one or more levels of developmental education. While the need to assist students with weak academic skills is well known, little research has examined student progression through multiple levels of developmental education and into entry-level college courses. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the patterns and determinants of student progression through sequences of developmental education starting from initial referral. We rely primarily on a micro-level longitudinal dataset that includes detailed information about student progression through developmental education. This dataset was collected as part of the national community college initiative Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count. The dataset has many advantages, but it is not nationally representative; therefore, we check our results against a national dataset--the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988. Our results indicate that only 3 to 4 out of 10 students who are referred to remediation actually complete the entire sequence to which they are referred. Most students exit in the beginning of their developmental sequence--almost half fail to complete the first course in their sequence. The results also show that more students exit their developmental sequences because they did not enroll in the first or a subsequent course than because they failed a course in which they were enrolled. We also show that men, older students, Black students, part-time students, and students in vocational programs are less likely to progress through their full remedial sequences. Finally, we provide weaker evidence that some institutional characteristics are related to a lower probability of completion of developmental education.