The Blog is Back in Town

Accelerating Achievement has been a bit quiet for a couple of weeks. The elves have been called to other areas of the workshop, but they’re back in business now. Good thing our colleagues across the dev ed field have still been cranking out all sorts stuff that’s worth reading:

• This month, Getting Past Go, a developmental education state policy project of the Education Commission of the States, released a brief titled “Using State Policies to Ensure Effective Assessment and Placement in Remedial Education.” Mary Fulton, policy analyst at ECS, gives an excellent explanation of community college assessment and placement procedures and then walks through current research evaluating the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of current instruments and efforts to test the validity of those instruments. She then gives examples from states that are enacting policies to improve assessment by implementing multiple measures and clarifying the student intake process. The piece concludes with recommended assessment and placement policies for both states and postsecondary systems—and a chart that shows you which policies are currently in place in your state!
  
• The California Acceleration Project (CAP) just released their May newsletter, Acceleration News. You can read about progress among the CAP Community of Practice—how they’re scaling up and who’s joining the ranks. There also are details on how California community colleges are shrinking developmental course sequences, negotiating articulation agreements with four-year schools, and publishing new data on student performance in accelerated English and math courses. And a whole lot more—so check it out.

Looking for some professional development opportunities? Want to meet more folks that are committed to improving outcomes for community college students? Here are two upcoming events you should consider:

• The Community College of Baltimore County is hosting the Fourth Annual Conference on Acceleration in Baltimore, MD, June 7-8, with pre-conference workshops on writing, reading, and math on June 6. You can check out the conference schedule here and register here.

• The National Center for Postsecondary Research 2012 conference, “Strengthening Developmental Education: What Have We Learned and What’s Next,” is scheduled for June 21-22, 2012 at Columbia University in New York. See the agenda here and register here.