What's Up with DEI: Guilford Technical Community College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. Yesterday, we introduced North Carolina’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina.

Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) serves more than 40,000 students in Guilford County, North Carolina. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling 

• GTCC has exceeded its goal for increasing the number of students completing face-to-face or online COMPASS reviews. The launch of an online COMPASS review in April 2010 enabled the college to require a review for any student wanting to re-test. As of April 2011, 1,200 unduplicated, first-time students have completed the reviews and subsequently enrolled in courses. Fifty-nine percent of fall 2010 students who took the English or reading COMPASS test and then retested after a face-to-face or online review, tested at least one level higher. Thirty-five percent of math students tested one or more levels higher. These advancements represent $160,000 in tuition savings for GTCC students. 

• GTCC is currently testing COMPASS Review 2.0, which incorporates high-definition video instruction, better graphics, and greater usability. The college plans to make COMPASS Review 2.0 available without cost to all 58 North Carolina community colleges 

Institutional Policy

• GTCC’s orientation program for developmental education students, SSOAR, has shown higher longer-term persistence among students who complete: first year persistence of completers vs. non-completers was 58 percent vs. 48 percent; persistence to a third term is 50 percent vs. 39 percent. GTCC now requires that new students requiring two or more developmental education courses attend SSOAR to ensure that more of those that can benefit take advantage of the program.  

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• At GTCC, DEI has inspired curriculum evaluation and creative thinking about how to effectively accelerate students through developmental education. Since beginning their DEI work, GTCC has:
• modified the college’s math supplemental instruction courses to include one hour of mandatory tutoring every day to lower the number of course repeaters;
• begun offering multiple sections of fast track math and reading courses, so students can complete two levels in one semester;
• begun building a 150 workstation math lab to house a computer-based, modular math curriculum;
• added course options that combine content from both upper-level developmental reading and English courses.

Only in Miami

It may be hot hot hot here (and everywhere else), but cooler heads are certainly prevailing at the 2011 ATD-DEI Summer State Policy meeting. Led by Jobs for the Future, representatives from ATD & DEI states have gathered for a day and half of learning, a little commiseration (it IS a lousy economy), and a lot of thoughtful planning for the year to come. The discussions are organized according to the DEI State Policy Framework, so we're diving into data-driven improvement, investment in innovation, and policy supports.

Yesterday began with state-to-state sharing; teams covered current budget situations (context is important), and then reported on recent legislative action, the most important progress on developmental education and college completion policy; the groups also discussed where they were headed and what they hoped to achieve in 2012. While there were many familiar frustrations regarding budget constraints, states reported movement on policy priorities and picked up some good ideas from their colleagues about other ways to approach the work.

The remainder of the day was chock full of working sessions on performance funding, ABE and dev ed alignment (see Bruce Vandal's take on the session here), and closer looks at how some states are identifying and responding to policy barriers and state mandates. Sara Goldrick-Rab presented some thought-provoking research on cost-effectiveness studies and Shanna Smith Jaggers assessed the evidence of recent dev ed research. We also got updates on the developmental ed redesigns in Virginia and North Carolina, learned more about new centers for student success in Michigan and Arkansas  and delved a little deeper into MDRC's recent dev ed research literature review. Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed was also here, with some frank advice on how to tell the community college story.

Today is all about connecting the ATD-DEI work with other national completion initiatives, like Complete to Compete, Accelerating Opportunity, Getting Past Go, and Complete College America. We'll be digging into data, too, considering how to organize and present information to make clear, compelling arguments for all sorts of constituents. And that's all before lunch!

Check back in the next week or two for additional recap. Jobs for the Future packs a meeting with too much good info for one blog post!


Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up with DEI: North Carolina

During July and August, we’re sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This week, we’re focusing on North Carolina, the Tar Heel State.

The North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) serves as the state team lead for North Carolina’s ATD/DEI state policy work. One of the state’s 58 community colleges participates in DEI, Guilford Technical Community College. Five others are ATD colleges (Asheville-Buncombe Tech, Central Piedmont, Davidson County, Durham Tech, and Martin). In the last year, North Carolina has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• NCCCS has created a Performance Measures Committee comprised of leaders from across the system. This committee will develop recommendations for new student success measures. They began by investigating national accountability frameworks from the National Governors Association, Complete College America, and the American Association of Community Colleges.
• NCCCS completed a statewide listening tour of each of the 58 North Carolina community colleges. Colleges identified gaps in developmental education offerings and barriers.

Investment in Innovation

• NCCCS is developing a statewide redesign of developmental math curricula and delivery. In October 2010, it approved design principles to steer developmental math redesign, as well as a process to identify 18 developmental and curriculum math faculty from across the state to carry out curriculum redesign. It has now formed a DEI Math Task Force comprised of faculty and administrators from across the state. The new math modules will be implemented in 2012; the courses will be paired with a custom diagnostic test (also in development) and revised placement policies. The eight modules are designed so they can be taken in a year, in contrast to the current three-semester sequence.

Policy Supports

• To support the developmental math redesign, a group of administrators is designing processes to address necessary changes in administration, including registration, tuition, data management systems, and financial aid disbursement practices.
• NCCCS has begun a validation study of Accuplacer and COMPASS, two placement exams used within the system. They are conducting a study of other possible placement measures.

For more details on DEI state policy accomplishments, check out Jobs For the Future’s latest DEI publication Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education Outcomes.

Where in the News is Developmental Education?

1. Last month, MDRC released a report that analyzes the current research available on developmental education. In Unlocking the Gate: What We Know About Improving Developmental Education, MDRC “identifies the most promising approaches for revising the structure, curriculum, or delivery of developmental education and suggests areas for future innovations in developmental education practice and research.” 
2. A recent Hechinger Report article, “Two years after Obama’s college graduation initiative, major obstacles remain,” examines progress made towards the American Graduation Initiative’s goal of drastically improving the proportion of young people with college degrees.
3. Mark your calendars! On August 4th, Jobs for the Future and Getting Past Go are hosting an online jam. The title and topic of the real-time, online discussion will be “Ending the Failure of Severely Under-Prepared Adults in Higher Education in a Time of Fiscal Restraint.” 
4. Over at Completion Matters, you can view a video of Steven Johnson, president of one of our DEI institutions, Sinclair Community College. President Johnson discusses the role of student supports in developmental education and student success.
5. Yesterday, Inside Higher Ed ran an article from Bruce Vandal and Jane Wellman on the “5 Myths of Remedial Ed.” The authors effectively debunk five insidious, but surprisingly common, myths about developmental education:
• Myth 1: Remedial Education is K-12’s problem;
• Myth 2: Remedial Education is a Short-Term Problem;
• Myth 3: Colleges Effectively Determine College Readiness;
• Myth 4: Remedial Education is Bankrupting the System;
• Myth 5: Maybe Some Students are Just Not College Material

What’s Up with DEI: Valencia College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. Yesterday, we introduced Florida and their state policy team; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Valencia College  in Orlando, FL.

Valencia College serves more than 55,000 credit students in Orange and Osceola Counties. Valencia chose to expand ATD pilots of learning communities and supplemental instruction as part of their DEI work. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling 

• The college has exceeded its goal for increasing the number of Learning in Community (LinC) students: in 2010-2011, they offered 50 sections; this is an increase from 40 sections offered in 2009-2010. When comparing course by course (LinC vs. Non-LinC), developmental mathematic courses that are linked continue to show a higher success rate. For example, the Beginning Algebra course over the past five years has had a 15 percent higher success rate, meaning students earned an A, B, or C in the course. The Pre-Algebra and Intermediate Algebra courses over the same time period have also shown increased student success, 11 percent and 12 percent respectively. 
• Valencia also has exceeded their goal for increasing the number of Supplemental Learning (SL) leaders in classrooms and disciplines. In 2010-2011, there were 410 SL sections, serving 9,500 students; this is an increase from 320 sections in 2009-2010. Supplemental learning continues to have a positive impact on student success overall; while students in gateway courses who attend SL sessions show the greatest success (12 percent to 19 percent greater success rates), the success rate for all students in SL courses is higher (1 percent to 4 percent) even if they don’t attend SL.

Institutional Policy

• Valencia is also revising several course outlines as part of their DEI work. These outlines will be aligned with the Florida Department of Education’s new statewide developmental course competencies. The focus on course outline revisions strategy  is connected to a review process established at the college prior to DEI. However, the goals of DEI helped to shape the revision process and have influenced the outcomes. Valencia’s stated DEI goal of infusing college success skills into developmental reading, writing, and math courses assisted in the process of examining course content and provided the impetus to develop a process for course review. 

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• As part of the redesigned course outlines in developmental education reading, writing, and math courses, faculty have created 25 projects infusing college success skills into their courses.

Guest Post: Florida Remakes Placement Test

Today’s guest post comes from John Hughes, associate vice chancellor for evaluation at the Division of Florida Colleges. John is here to tell us about Florida’s new placement mechanism, the Postsecondary Education Readiness Test.

The Florida College System (FCS) is comprised of 28 colleges with 887,000 students enrolled in 2009-10. More than half of the colleges offer baccalaureate programs, though upper division enrollments represent only about 1 percent of the total. This reflects the system’s historic and continuing mission to serve lower division or two-year students. As part of that mission, Florida has long had well-established readiness testing and placement policies. All students are required to take a common placement test for reading, writing, and math, and are required to enroll in developmental education if they do not meet the minimum cut scores. For years Florida used the Accuplacer as the primary placement tool.

In 2008, working with the assistance of Achieve’s American Diploma Project, Florida began working toward a common definition of college readiness that would include specific expectations of what students need to know and be able to do in order to succeed in their first college-level English and math classes. During the same time period, the state’s contract for the Accuplacer expired and had to be re-bid. The Division of Florida Colleges recognized the opportunity and released an invitation to negotiate (ITN) for a test that would reflect the definition of college readiness already under development.

The requirements and expectations for the new test were established by English and math faculty. Statute and rule require a test that covers three subjects – reading, writing, and math. Faculty determined the content by identifying the competencies necessary to succeed in college credit courses and also developing example questions. The competencies were then used to create a test blueprint that identifies how many questions each student will be asked for each competency. Faculty approved the blueprint as well as the alignment of each item to the competencies and the content of every test item. Thus, Florida college faculty guided and shaped the entire test development process.

In October 2010, the Florida Department of Education’s Division of Florida Colleges (division) and McCann Associates rolled out the Florida Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (PERT). The test went live with interim cut-scores designed to replicate the placement rates observed with the Accuplacer. Once students have been placed using the PERT and the state has received their course outcomes, the division and McCann will conduct a detailed analysis to determine if the cut-scores are appropriate or need to be revised.

With a new placement test now in use, Florida is moving ahead with the development of diagnostic tests. Once again faculty members were asked to identify the competencies for the tests. In this case the competencies focused on the skills necessary to move into college credit courses. The diagnostic exams will be given to students who place into either the upper or lower level developmental courses. Data from the exams can be used to guide instruction or even to direct students into a modularized curriculum that focuses on just those areas in which a student is deficient. The lower level diagnostic tests are schedule to go live in August, 2011.

In addition to its use for entering college students, in 2011-12 the PERT will be used to assess the readiness of all 11th grade students whose high school assessments indicate they are at risk of not being college ready. Those who do not meet the cut-scores will be given remediation in 12th grade. As many as 150,000 Florida 11th graders may be eligible for readiness testing.


John Hughes is associate vice chancellor for evaluation at the Division of Florida Colleges.

What’s Up with DEI: Florida

During July and August, we’re sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This week, we’re focusing on Florida, the Sunshine State!

The Division of Florida Colleges serves as the state team lead for Florida’s ATD/DEI state policy work. One of the state’s 28 community colleges participates in DEI (Valencia); three others are ATD colleges (Broward, Hillsborough, and Tallahassee). The division has made great efforts to leverage ATD/DEI data collection, learning, and progress across all of the colleges, including six additional colleges that received grants from the division to pursue developmental education redesign (Florida State College at Jacksonville, Miami Dade College, North Florida Community College, Santa Fe College, St. Johns River State College, and St. Petersburg College). In the last year, Florida has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• The Division of Florida Colleges is developing a student success dashboard, with initial rollout planned for this summer. The goal of the dashboard is to make accountability and outcome data more visible and accessible to state and local decision makers. The dashboard will provide access to a series of dynamic reports on student performance and outcomes; each entering cohort of students (FTIC and Transfer) will be tracked for six years using the ATD intermediate benchmarks and final outcomes. 

Investment in Innovation

• The division identified six non-DEI colleges to redesign and implement pilot models for developmental education course delivery using a modularized format and awarded $10,000 grants. The college redesign teams revised and finalized their implementation plans with consultation and technical assistance from the division throughout the 2010 summer and fall terms. All six colleges began implementation of their modularized courses in January 2011.

Policy Supports

• The Florida Postsecondary Education Readiness Test (P.E.R.T.) was released in October 2010.   Twenty-six of Florida’s 28 colleges have implemented the P.E.R.T.  There also will be two diagnostic assessments for each discipline, one for each upper-level and one for each lower-level developmental education course, with the first diagnostic test available in August. The division held a developmental education faculty workshop in October 2010 to identify developmental education competencies that will inform the development of these diagnostics. Colleges will begin offering the new courses with the corresponding competencies and implementing the diagnostic assessments in fall 2011 or spring 2012 terms.
• The Florida Legislature amended the 2008 legislation to establish an early assessment and remediation program for high school students. This amendment requires school districts to test all 11th grade students within a specified score range on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test for college readiness. An estimated 150,000 students will be eligible for testing this coming year. Previously, this program was voluntary.

For more details on DEI state policy accomplishments, check out Jobs For the Future’s latest DEI publication Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education Outcomes.

Guest Post: Four Principles to Guide Reform

In today’s post, Shanna Smith Jaggars, senior research associate at the Community College Research Center (CCRC), Teachers College, Columbia University, hits the high points of CCRC’s Assessment of Evidence series. We’ve referenced the series on the blog before, but we thought you deserved a more comprehensive introduction.

This spring, the Community College Research Center released the Assessment of Evidence, a series of reports that present research-based recommendations to improve the success of community college students. In this post, I’ll briefly introduce the four key recommendations that arose from that work, and how they apply to developmental education reform.

1.     Simplify the structures and bureaucracies that students must navigate.
This recommendation rests upon the finding that overly complex environments tend to cause people (all people, not just students) to make poor decisions. Accordingly, colleges should take a step back and look at their developmental education policies and practices to ensure they are not inadvertently creating unnecessary barriers, confusion, and frustration. Where possible, the developmental education sequence should be streamlined. Good examples include the Statway program and Virginia’s planned developmental math redesign, both of which aim to rationalize the developmental curriculum and improve its alignment with college-level material.

2.    Broad engagement of all faculty should become the foundation for policies and practices to increase student success.
Reforms that are defined at the top and then imposed on faculty will not be lasting or effective. Reform should begin by engaging faculty in defining metrics and goals that they feel are meaningful – that is, by encouraging faculty to develop concrete student learning outcomes for their courses. Regular examination of their own students’ learning outcomes will help engage faculty in the process of experimentation and innovation necessary to improve those outcomes.

In developmental classes, faculty should consider incorporating learning outcomes related to academic behaviors, such as study skills, that help students be more successful in college. Incorporating such goals will lay the foundation for integrating supports to develop such skills into the everyday curriculum (see our report on non-academic supports).

3.    Define common learning outcomes and assessments, and set high standards for those outcomes.
In K-12, schools that are successful with disadvantaged populations provide faculty with the time and support to work together to create coherent programs, with clear outcomes, common assessments, and integrated supports. Thus, our third recommendation builds on the second: engage faculty in working together to craft learning outcomes and assessments, with common measurement of outcomes across all sections of a course. That doesn’t mean all assignments have to be the same; it can mean a common final exam, or a final course project or portfolio that is graded according to a common rubric across sections. Faculty should collaborate not just on developmental courses, but also on learning outcomes for key introductory college-level courses, thus creating stronger alignment between developmental and college-level course material. Setting high standards for course outcomes -- which, typically, will not initially be met -- will challenge the department to innovate. For example, we uncovered very promising evidence for developmental pedagogies such as contextualization and structured group collaboration (see our contextualization and math pedagogy reports), but these instructional tactics are not widespread, perhaps primarily because they require intensive and focused faculty development. Colleges, departments, and individual faculty will be more motivated to systematically pursue such strategies if they can clearly see the gaps between their own goals and the reality of their students’ current learning.

4.    Colleges should collect and use data to inform a continuous improvement process.
Achieving the Dream and Developmental Education Initiative colleges are already very familiar with the notion of using data and measurement as part of a continuous improvement cycle. For this process to have impact, faculty and mid-level administrators must be involved in defining and shaping it. To help support faculty involvement, colleges can rethink incentives, committee structures, and professional development. In particular, professional development resources might be redirected toward supporting the faculty teams described in the third recommendation.

For more on the eight strategies and four recommendations, you can download the reports from the CCRC website – and feel free to leave your suggestions (or objections!) from a practitioner’s perspective in the comments below.

Shanna Smith Jaggars is a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center (CCRC), Teachers College, Columbia University.

What’s Up with DEI: Norwalk Community College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. Yesterday, we introduced Connecticut and their state policy team; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Norwalk Community College in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Norwalk Community College (NCC) serves close to 6,500 students in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Norwalk chose to expand an ATD pilot of learning communities as part of their DEI work. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling

• As NCC has undertaken an expansion of learning communities, they also have expanded related professional development. The college’s Learning Community Leadership Team identified six common elements of learning communities at NCC: Collaborative Learning, Effective Communication, Technological Literacy, Critical Thinking, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Practice. Focusing on these common elements in both individual and shared assignments helps faculty to create integrative learning experiences that contribute to the learning outcomes of each course. The college has also standardized several learning community activities that include both classroom assignments and reflection by participating faculty.

Institutional Policy

• In fall 2010, NCC hired two new institutional research (IR) staff. The new IR director was awarded a Presidential Scholarship for the Association of Institutional Research’s Data and Decisions workshop through a program funded by the Lumina Foundation.
• At the end of spring 2010, NCC began creating a five-year strategic plan through the concerted and comprehensive efforts of the entire college. Since this endeavor is occurring simultaneously with DEI, many of the initiative and strategic plan objectives are coordinated and complementary.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• In the coming year, NCC will have a master’s student from a local university on staff serving as a case manager for learning community students. This case manager will administer and analyze a Noel-Levitz instrument for high-risk students in the learning communities, assess those students’ needs and concerns, and provide follow-up services, as well as leading a weekly group activity with learning community students identified as being particularly high risk.
• Having identified the common elements of learning communities to facilitate more integrative learning experiences that contribute to the learning outcomes of each course, the LC Leadership Team has started a resource bank of successful assignments from which faculty can draw. 

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up with DEI: Housatonic Community College

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This morning, we introduced Connecticut and their state policy team; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport, CT.

Housatonic Community College (HCC) serves more than 6000 students in its 11-town service area in southwestern Connecticut. Housatonic chose to expand an Achieving the Dream (ATD) pilot of a self-paced math course as part of their DEI work. We’ve selected some highlights from their last year of DEI work in three main categories: scaling, institutional policy change, and academic and supportive service innovations.

Scaling

• The college’s Open Entry/Open Exit (OE/OE) math courses now cover 40 percent of sections offered in three developmental math courses. OE/OE English has been added to the curriculum and comprises 63 percent of lower-level developmental English courses and 19 percent of the upper-level developmental English courses. HCC has adopted the name “self-paced” to reduce confusion about the course format!

Institutional Policy Change

• Supportive institutional policies are an integral part of sustaining promising DEI innovations, at all levels of the institution. As part of ATD, the college developed specific strategic plan objectives and outcomes that directly relate to student success goals. College policies related to developmental students, such as mandatory developmental course placement students who score below college-level in English, math, or reading have continued through ATD and DEI.

 Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Housatonic is focused on improving student engagement in the self-paced courses, since the model has proven most successful for those students that fully participate. Case managers have been added to sections of self-paced math courses to encourage course attendance and homework completion.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up with DEI: Connecticut

Connecticut State Policy Blog Post
Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of DEI’s state policy and college accomplishments. We’re making our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. We’re leading off with Connecticut, the Constitution State!

The Connecticut Community College (CCC) system Chancellor’s Office serves as the state team lead for Connecticut’s ATD/DEI state policy work. Two of the state’s 12 community colleges participate in DEI (Housatonic and Norwalk), but the system has made great efforts to leverage ATD/DEI data collection, learning, and progress across all twelve institutions. In the last year, Connecticut has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• A business intelligence tool is in beta testing for state-wide implementation; training is underway for a launch at all 12 Connecticut Community College system institutions.
• The system contributed data collection and analysis in a Connecticut Association for Human Services report: Developmental Education at Connecticut Community Colleges: The Key to Economic Recovery in February 2011.

Investment in Innovation

• A CCC’s Chancellor incentive funding program announced in 2010-2011 included:
• $50,000 per college devoted to developmental education initiatives
• $1.24M in incentive funding for improvements in intermediate benchmarks and developmental education outcomes
• $5,000 per college to support faculty involvement and professional development in curriculum redesign efforts.
• A professional development fund to support faculty participation at developmental education conferences to encourage utilization and dissemination of best practices throughout the system.

All 12 colleges will be invited to submit proposals for participation in the fund. 

Policy Supports

• Further support for longitudinal tracking system has been secured with an agreement between the State Department of Education and higher education units, and new legislation requiring unique identifiers on high school transcripts to facilitate data analysis on student success in college and the state’s workforce.
• The System also led a series of developmental education convenings in the last year:
• A Developmental Education Forum including the chancellor, presidents, academic deans, and deans of students.
• A Developmental Education Task Force; the task force submitted policy recommendations to the Council of Presidents in June 2011.

For more details on DEI state policy accomplishments, check out Jobs For the Future’s latest DEI publication Driving Innovation: How Six States Are Organizing to Improve Outcomes in Developmental Education Outcomes.

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

What’s Up With DEI

With the close of the fiscal year last month, it’s the season of annual reports and compliance documents. And though deadlines and details are sometimes stressful, the process does provide an opportunity to reflect on accomplishments, to remember what worked really well, and to formalize those “I’ll never do THAT again” mental notes. We’ve recently reviewed the annual reports from DEI state policy teams and colleges; it’s exciting to see the progress, the unexpected successes, and the continued commitment to improving outcomes for students in developmental education.

Over the next several weeks, we’ll be sharing some of the accomplishments at the state and college-level. We’ll make our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. State profiles will be organized according to the DEI State Policy Framework: data-driven improvement; investment in innovation; and policy supports. College recaps will be organized in three categories: scaling; institutional policy change; and academic and supportive service innovations.

We’ll lead off with Connecticut tomorrow, but today, we’ve got a quick snap shot of the accomplishments and challenges that we’re seeing across the initiative.

DEI State Policy Teams

• Data-Driven Improvement. States are implementing new technology to collect state-wide data, conducting evaluations of developmental education policies and practices, and creating dashboards of ATD/DEI intermediate benchmarks. Some of these efforts have sometimes run up against…the intricacies of establishing agreements for data sharing. States also are navigating the recent proliferation of national efforts to develop community college performance metrics.
• Investment in Innovation. States are providing incentive funding for campus-level innovation, as well as acting as conveners for state-wide curriculum redesign and professional development. Sadly, some of these efforts are threatened by continuing state budget crises.
• Policy Supports. Some states are conducting system-wide developmental education policy reviews; others have seen supportive legislation passed in the last year. The teams have participated in semiannual ATD/DEI state policy meetings, further strengthening the policy learning community. States and colleges are still wrestling with constraints caused by federal financial aid regulations that complicate funding for promising non-course-based and non-semester-based instruction.

DEI Colleges

• Scaling. Ten of the fifteen DEI colleges have met or exceeded their expansion targets on at least one of their interventions; some have exceeded these targets in all of the DEI work. All are planning for continued expansion of the most effective practices. Staff turnover, budget constraints, and increasing enrollment are particularly thorny issues at some colleges when it comes to meeting scaling targets.
• Institutional Policy Change. In the last year, three more colleges have taken the eliminate late-registration plunge; others have made orientation, advising, and enrollment in required dev ed courses and student success courses mandatory. Some colleges are still facing institutional research challenges when it comes to collecting necessary data, but many are putting new practices in place to coordinate student success efforts across the college. 
• Academic and Supportive Service Innovations. Colleges are engaging faculty, staff, and their communities to refine and improve DEI interventions. The individual college profiles will highlight exciting work in cooperative learning, supplementation instruction, modularization, and contextualization. For all of the progress, some colleges still face faculty engagement issues as they expand; others are struggling to get all eligible students to participate in practices and programs that have proven effective for their peers.

So, what’s up with DEI? A whole lot. We look forward to sharing more of it over the coming weeks! 

Abby Parcell is a Program Manager at MDC.

Guest Post: Choose Your Own Adventure

Today’s post comes from Sharon Miller, professor of transitional English at Lone Star College-CyFair in Cypress, Texas, outside of Houston. The Lone Star Community College District joined Achieving the Dream in 2006. Sharon’s post describes a classroom-focused intervention that has improved student success in CyFair’s transitional (or developmental) English department.

When an Achieving the Dream pilot at Lone Star College’s CyFair campus resulted in a 7 percent increase in overall student success, it got our attention. Applying what we learned, our success rates have continued to improve to above the 90th percentile of national benchmarks because the project is affordable, do-able, scalable, and sustainable to any discipline, anywhere. The secret: target the most important contact a student has with an institution: the classroom.

A Non-Boutique Project
Two years ago, our college system’s Achieving the Dream grant funding was coming to an end just as the Transitional English department was charged with devising a pilot to improve student success. The state legislature was slashing budgets just as our college system was experiencing an “enrollment tsunami” that hit our campus particularly hard. With a 29/71 full-time to adjunct professor ratio, there was no one available to take on a new project and no space to host a boutique student success center. We needed an ATD intervention that would work for us.
    
The Classroom-Embedded Intervention Pilot
Our Classroom-Embedded Intervention Project was “choose your own adventure” style. The concept was deceptively simple:

• Ask the faculty to share what strategies were working to improve student success.
• List the best and distribute them.
• Track out-of-class interventions and withdrawals on student profile cards. 
• Look at the results measured by end-of-course grades and performance on System Common Final Exams. 

Sharing success strategies for our ATD pilot was intense, energizing, and fun. Faculty circulated ideas via e-mail, and adjunct instructors joined the conversation. Soon we had an amazing list of strategies which we distributed at our spring kick-off meeting and posted in our online repository, The Sandbox. We all started the semester focused on good teaching and intensively intervening according to each instructor’s best professional judgment. Interventions were recorded on a student profile card that also included student contact information.

Analyze Results; Build On What Works
When student success rose 7 percent, we knew that we were on the right track. Looking at the student profile cards helped us to see patterns in interventions and withdrawals, and we have used this information to more carefully devise targeted interventions. We continue to share resources on our online learning repository and have added a Saturday work day a month into the semester to focus on pedagogy. Week 11 of each semester is now designated as “Advising Week.” Instructors use a one-page handout to tell students about the next course in their sequence, course delivery options, and answer questions. 

Ongoing professional development is imperative and challenging. Many of us are pursuing the International Alliance for Learning Certification in Accelerated Learning, and we are sharing the program’s researched-based, brain-friendly methods that improve student success and retention.

CyFair’s has expanded the Classroom Embedded Intervention throughout the Transitional English department. The Transitional Math and ESOL Departments are considering implementing the approach in the fall semester, and plans are under way for a presentation at an all-college faculty forum on student success. Faculty will have an opportunity to learn about what the Transitional English department has accomplished and to consider how the approach can be expanded college-wide in appropriate, discipline-specific ways. 

Interested?
You are invited to download our list of interventions, advising handout, and contacts for accelerated learning, which are posted on my faculty webpage. Together, we can achieve the dream one classroom at a time!

Sharon Miller is a professor of transitional English at Lone Star-CyFair. The Classroom-Embedded Intervention has been nominated for a Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board STAR Award.

Guest Post: Changing Lives by Improving Skills

Today’s post comes from Kyle Smith, dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas. WTC joined Achieving the Dream in 2010 and dug into developmental education right off the bat. Below, Kyle shares how he has incorporated techniques he learned as a community college student into WTC’s developmental and vocational offerings to improve student success—and how WTC is now taking the approach to local junior high and high schools in hopes of having an even larger impact on college readiness.

During my high school years, I never gave much thought about going to college. I actually waited until the spring of my senior year to even take the ACT. Based on the results of the ACT, my high school counselor told me that if I did decide to go to college I would be at best a “C”-level student. Looking back, I am certainly surprised that a counselor would make such a negative prophetic statement. However, she initially turned out to be right. Right after my high school graduation I enrolled in a summer college course and made a C. In many ways, I felt as if I had landed right about where I was supposed to. I then accepted a partial athletic scholarship to a community college and this is where academically things changed dramatically for me.
 
This particular community college’s counseling office sponsored a series of workshops that dealt with very specific academic skill sets. I had never been exposed to SQ3R; OK4R; Cornell notes; the 80/20 Rule; the LOCI system of memory; and backward planning to name a few. Why had I not heard of any of these approaches before? Where had they been? I was very hungry for them. I began to apply some of them almost immediately and they made all the difference in the world for me. Through repetition and practice, I ultimately developed a very specialized set of academic skills that enabled me to graduate with honors in all of my subsequent academic pursuits. For me, these skill sets represented a message of hope. 

As a higher education administrator, I understand the importance of having high expectations for students. However, I also understand just how critical it is to provide students some of the tools necessary to meet those expectations. The development of a college readiness course that includes the aforementioned skill sets has been an important initiative at Western Texas College. We have seen great results in pairing such content with developmental coursework. We began pairing the readiness course with fast-tracked developmental math courses in 2009. The 2009 successful completion rate for traditional developmental math courses was just under 40 percent; the successful completion rate for the fast-track courses in Spring 2011 was 70 percent.

We are also integrating the college readiness content into vocational programs, including our Licensed Vocational Nursing curriculum. We understand that information without application is rather worthless for most students. We also know that they need to apply what they have learned in relevant ways. We are essentially trying to knock out two birds with one stone: for example, a child care major referred to a developmental reading or English course can apply the Cornell note-taking approach to program specific content that s/he will encounter in a later course. Perhaps, the student applies Cornell to an article about Piaget's stages of cognitive reasoning. Such integration requires coordination between program chairs and a developmental faculty member who has completed the academic skill sets training. At WTC, we initially ran the academic skill sets class as a stand-alone class; while that worked well, it was difficult to secure the funding to continue the courses on a long-term basis. We are now diligently working on integrating the content into the vocational curricula, training the respective program chairs and vocational instructors in the academic skills content. Once they’ve been trained, they recommend where the content can be introduced in the existing vocational curricula. We’re still in the early stages, but so far so good!

This summer we will be holding train-the-trainer workshops on the academic skill set content. We will have junior high and high school faculty there as well as our own college faculty. There is a hunger for specifics – items that students can start applying in class the very next day. If our colleagues at the secondary level can introduce these skill sets to students before they come to our doors then we are well on our way to truly changing lives for the better. 

Kyle Smith is dean of academic instruction at Western Texas College in Snyder, Texas.