Saving Developmental Education - Huffington Post Online

"....The national dialogue exclaiming that developmental education programs do not work is not only a false declaration but a futile approach to improving student persistence and ultimately degree completion. A number of states have withdrawn support for developmental education courses based on the notion that they are expensive, ineffective, and do not belong in four-year colleges and universities. In a few instances, state scholarship programs no longer allow funds to be used to take developmental education courses. Improving degree completion, however, will require institutions to serve students more effectively and a policy environment that does not marginalize developmental education or attempt to relegate it to community colleges...." [Click on this link for the entire article from the Huffington Post.]

Achieving the Dream Intervention Showcase Opens for Use

Learn how Achieving the Dream Colleges promote student success and improve student outcomes across the nation. To get started, click the help button or start exploring. The Interventions Showcase is an information dashboard with 3 different tabs, each presenting a different view of the data that colleges have provided about how they strive to improve student outcomes. Review the 4 simple steps below to learn how to get the most out of the Showcase. [Click on this link for the Intervention Showcase.]  [Click on this link for the official press release and link to a video overview of the web site resources.]

The database is composed of nearly 500 interventions from over 100 of the official Achieving the Dream colleges. The database can be used by anyone, but only ATD member institutions can access the contact person at the institution for more information about the intervention. In any case, it is still valuable to see what others are doing and the brief descriptions are helpful to guide anyone with their search of interventions that perhaps fit a particular kind of institution and serving a specific demographic group.

Congratulations to ATD for making their vast knowledge base morer accessible. Perhaps in future years the database will be expanded with more information and perhaps providing the contact person for the institution. A little sleuthing at the institution's web site or calling general telephone for the college might aim you to the correct person or least the sponsoring unit.

Using the Interventions Showcase, you can browse and search by:
 Content Area (e.g. English, Math)
 Type (e.g. Advising, First-Year Experience)
 Target Population (e.g First-Time Students)
 IPEDS Institutional Characteristics (e.g. Locale, Size)

Background on ATD:

• Mission: Achieving the Dream is a national reform network dedicated to community college student success and completion; focused primarily on helping low-income students and students of color complete their education and obtain market-valued credentials.


• Vision: To lead the most comprehensive, evidence-based reform movement for community college student success in higher education history, resulting in significantly improved lives and greater global economic competitiveness for the United States.


• Values: Evidence-based, student centered, and built on the values of equity and excellence, Achieving the Dream, Inc. embraces continuous improvement, fosters creativity and innovation, and operates with transparency and respect.

Strategies to Boost Enrollment of Low-Income, High-Ability Students in Selective Admissions Colleges

From the New York Times:  "The group that administers the SAT has begun a nationwide outreach program to try to persuade more low-income high school seniors who scored high on standardized tests to apply to select colleges.  The group, the College Board, is sending a package of information on top colleges to every senior who has an SAT or Preliminary SAT score in the top 15 percent of test takers and whose family is in the bottom quarter of income distribution. The package, which includes application fee waivers to six colleges of the student’s choice, will be sent to roughly 28,000 seniors...."

From the Chronicle of Higher Education.  The author is the governor of Delaware.  Some of solutions being enacted in the state are similar to those used in TRiO programs for decades.  It is good to see embracement of the TRiO practice, better yet to see them reference the pioneering work of the TRiO community.  The whole article is available by clicking this web link or by going to the Chronicle web site.

"A recent study by the Stanford economist Caroline M. Hoxby and Christopher Avery, of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, found that academically qualified, low-income students are far less likely to apply to or attend the nation's most selective colleges than their higher-income counterparts are. Only 34 percent of high-achieving high-school seniors in the bottom quarter of family income went to one of the 238 most selective colleges, compared with 78 percent of students from the top quarter. Those who underestimate their qualifications graduate from college far less frequently and lose out on career opportunities—and we as a society lose out on the contributions they could make.

Recognizing the role a college education can play in lifting young people out of poverty, I am distressed that we have students from those backgrounds—many of whom would be first in their family to go to college—who have earned the chance to pursue a degree but don't realize it and, thus, never reach their full potential. Many times they don't even apply to college, because they think they can't afford it and they don't have anyone telling them it is possible.

The good news is that research shows we can change this trend simply by better informing these students. In Delaware last month we announced that the College Board would send information on college affordability and financial aid, as well as materials to help with choosing colleges, to all seniors whose high-school work demonstrates that they are ready for college.

Additionally, low-income students will receive application-fee waivers, which have traditionally been far too complicated to obtain. And our highest-achieving low-income students will find a letter signed by all of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, and MIT, congratulating them on their achievements, encouraging them to apply, and letting them know that many low- and moderate-income students attend those institutions at no cost."

Resource for First-Generation College Students

I'm First is an online community for first-generation college students—and their supporters. Hear inspiring stories and share your own, discover colleges that care about first-gen students, find answers to your questions about college, and receive guidance on the road to and through college.  I'm First is a winner of the College Knowledge Challenge, a competitive grant initiative sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Facebook, College Summit, and King Center Charter School.  [Click on this link for theI'm First web site].

ECAR 2013 National Study of Student Technology Use

From the Chronicle of Higher Education by Jason Jones

The Educause Center for Analysis and Research (ECAR) has released the latest version of its annual report, ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013.  First, students have lots of devices, but relatively little incentive or freedom to use them in class:

Students did seem to indicate an interest in having their phones and/or tablets be more directly incorporated into academics.

Second, two-thirds of students report that their faculty “use technology effectively”:

It’s a little unclear what the students’ judgment is based on here: stuff not crashing? Faculty finding their comfort zone and sticking with it? Regardless, it is useful to know that students respect the faculty’s technology use.

Third, the report asserts that “60% of students prefer to keep their academic and social lives separate,” although there wasn’t a lot of followup about student interest in social networking and academic work in general. (For example, since a lot of Twitter clients support multiple accounts, it’s not terribly difficult to keep one’s academic and social life separate.)

And finally, the report also says that students prefer that faculty themselves provide instruction in how to use technology, rather than rely on the help desk or online-only documentation, which suggests that for the foreseeable future, faculty who incorporate technology in interesting or significant ways will need to continue to budget class time to cover how to use the tech.

There are also interesting results about how students want to use LMSes, and more. As always, Educause interprets the data in light of its understanding of of the institional/corporate world of information technology, rather than a faculty-centered one. (As I’ve already joked on Twitter, no one but Educause would characterize the fact that “Students expressed only moderate interest in learner analytics” as a “surprising” finding, unless what was surprising was that their interest was as high as “moderate.”) Nevertheless, it is certainly helpful to understand how students talk about their use of information technology, especially as one considers incorporating social media, or thinking about an electronic device policy.

At the ECAR site, you can download the full report, an infographic drawn from it, and the survey instrument.

New Research Confirms Some TRiO Best Education Practices

Dr. Shawn Harper previews research findings he'll be releasing formally today about the black and Latino male students who succeed in New York City high schools (and he said there was no reason to believe similar qualities don't help similar students in other urban high schools). The study wasn't of elite charter schools or wealthier parts of the city, but of students who had achieved academic success in regular high schools. Harper found not only that such students exist (no surprise to him, but perhaps to those who lament the dearth of such students) but that many of them have no idea that they would be attractive candidates for admission to some of the most elite colleges in the United States.

Harper -- director of the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania -- attracted considerable attention last year for a study in which he identified successful black male college students and examined the factors that led to their success. This new study is in a way the flip side of that research -- as his focus was on students in New York City high schools who could succeed in college (although he also included a group of New York City high school graduates who were in college for comparison purposes).

But what were the common characteristics that seemed to propel these students to succeed?

• Parental value of education. Many spoke of parents who related their own lack of education to their lack of money, and told their children they wanted better options for them.
• High expectations. The report says that "almost all" of the students in the study "remember being thought of as smart and capable when they were young boys."
• Learning to avoid neighborhood danger. Those who lived in unsafe neighborhoods reported parents who kept them inside whenever possible. Likewise, many of the students reported spending after-school hours in school buildings, in settings where they could study and also socialize in safer environments than were available to them near their homes.
• Avoiding gang recruitment. Many said that by becoming known as smart, and by having parents who didn't let them spend time outdoors, they weren't recruited into gangs.
• Teachers who cared and inspired. Harper asked the students to name and describe favorite high school teachers, and he noted that none of them had difficulty doing so, describing challenging teachers who knew and cared about them. He said that the teachers of these students are working in ways counter to the image of out-of-control urban schools.
• Reinforcement of college-going culture. One student noted that, at his high school, every day that a student was accepted at a college, the entire school was told about this over the public address system. While college-going might not be the norm for his socioeconomic group, he came to think of college-going as the norm from hearing these messages over and over again.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/30/new-study-explores-qualities-help-black-and-latino-males-succeed-high-school#ixzz2gOH4XCrF 
Inside Higher Ed 

Academic Support Programs at Elite Colleges Since the Beginning

One of my aggravations is the way the popular press and too often research publications claim that academic assistance programs, learning assistance, and developmental education were recently created.  The story goes they were created to serve the "new students" attending college.  That phrase is code language for first-generation, poor, and students of color.  The actual history of U.S. higher education actually records that academic support programs have always been with us.  Following is an excerpt from my book, Access at the Crossroads.  Enjoy.

Precollegiate academic assistance for most students at Harvard and Yale con­sisted of private tutors who prepared them for college entrance examinations in Greek and Latin and provided evidence of good moral character that was also required for admission. In the mid-1700s, Yale required proficiency in arithmetic in addition to the already stringent requirements. Other postsec­ondary institutions soon followed. Students who did not attend Latin gram­mar schools had few options for entering college. One option for gaining admittance to Yale was for a minister to place students in his home for private tutoring until they were ready for the college entrance exam (Cowie, 1936). This option was similar to the dame schools in England.

Once admitted to Harvard, most students continued to receive tutoring, as assigned readings and textbooks were written in Latin. Many college pro­fessors delivered lectures in the same language. Even in the most privileged families, verbal and written competency in Latin was unusual. Therefore, Harvard was the first postsecondary institution in the United States to require remedial studies for most of its first-year class of students (Boylan and White, 1987). After admission to prestigious colleges such as Harvard and Yale, stu­dents entered a cohort. Each week they met with the same tutor for group ses­sions. The tutors’ primary role was reading aloud the lesson material and then conducting a recitation session to detect whether students had correctly memorized the text. This practice failed to meet the needs for the most gifted and the struggling students, as it focused on the average student’s mastery level of the academic content material. The literature contains no evidence of the efficacy of this crude form of academic assistance.

Economics intervened in academic admission policies during the late 1700s. Because of the social norm of considering only white male students from highly prestigious families, most postsecondary institutions found it in their financial interest to admit students less prepared academically but possessing resources to pay college tuition and thus generate more revenue. By the time of the American Revolution, institutions began to differentiate themselves from one another by academic preparation levels of incoming college students and their official mission statements. Amherst and Williams admitted students unable to attend Harvard and Yale as a result of lower academic preparation or inadequate finances (Casazza and Silverman, 1996). Students experienced unofficial segregation policies and procedures. Stereotypes of perceived aca­demic inabilities and discrimination against females and students of color fueled this discrimination. Nathaniel Hawthorne described the students at Williams as “a rough, brown featured, schoolmaster-looking, half-bumpkin, half-scholar, in black, ill-cut broadcloth” (Rudolph, 1956, p. 47). These assumptions, based on ethnic and class prejudices, reflected social norms and prejudices shared by many in society, including key college policymakers. Admission criteria and procedures influenced by these stereotypes contributed to differentiation and stratification among postsecondary institutions.