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.
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