Crowdsourcing the Placement Test Dilemma

On Monday, the Inside Higher Ed blog Confessions of a Community College Dean, was all about how you know a student needs remediation. Blogger Dean Dad gives a succinct overview of the often frustrating process: cutoff scores, preparing (or not preparing) students for a high-stakes test, and mandated tests that have little predictive value for a student’s performance. And then there’s “thousands of new students showing up in a compressed timeframe, ranging in age from fresh out of high school to retirement, and you need to place them all quickly.” He includes a few possible responses—using high school GPA and other diagnostics, embedded remediation, or the “let them fail” approach.

He then tosses the ball to his readers, requesting examples of efficient methods for placing a lot of students in the right place in a relative short time. While it’s often dangerous to read comments on blog posts, there are some interesting suggestions in the mix—from software solutions to diagnostic tests that are directly tied to instructional modules. We’ve covered some of these approaches that are happening in DEI colleges and states here on Accelerating Achievement:

• El Paso Community College’s Pre-testing Retesting Educational Preparation (PREP) program that gives students a chance to prepare for—and retake, if necessary—the placement test
• Florida’s new diagnostic tests that are tied to a more closely aligned high school and college curricula
• Guilford Technical Community College’s face-to-face and online COMPASS reviews that include video instruction and retest opportunities

What’s working on your campus? Obviously, there are a lot of inquiring minds that want to know!

Closing Doors

The title of a Kevin Carey article in The New Republic is a question we’ve all been pondering for the past few years: “Why Are Community Colleges Being Treated Worst When They’re Needed Most?” Since the recession began, community colleges have been increasingly looked to as engines of economic recovery and to provide training for unemployed and low-income workers. Last week, President Obama once again touted their value during a speech at Lorain County Community College, an Achieving the Dream institution, in Ohio:

“When you take classes at a community college like this one and you learn the skills that you need to get a job right away, that does not just benefit you; it benefits the company that ends up hiring and profiting from your skills. It makes the entire region stronger economically. It makes this country stronger economically.”

Carey outlines at least three facets of a community college mission: “continuing education for adults, job training for local labor markets, and the first two years of a baccalaureate education.” Shining a spotlight on that mission and asking colleges to increase their productivity and flexibility isn’t a bad thing, but it has been accompanied by unprecedented resource cuts in state legislatures across the country. Calls for community colleges to do a better job are matched with slashed budgets, rather than with the investment and support that are needed for successful reform.

For decades, we’ve been working to expand access to higher education, while simultaneously trying to improve student success rates. Rising costs and reduced public investment are now threatening to reverse hard-won progress in higher education access and success. A new report by Gary Rhoades of the Center for the Future of Higher Education reveals that as enrollment caps expand and the number of educational programs narrow, many lower-income students and students of color are losing access points to postsecondary education. Rhoades explains:

“In a complicated ‘cascade effect,’ higher tuition and enrollment limitations at four-year institutions have pushed middle-class and upper middle-class students toward community colleges. This, in turn, increases competition for seats in community college classrooms at a time when funding for community colleges is being slashed and fees are increasing. As community colleges draw more affluent students, opportunity is being rationed and lower-income students (many of whom are students of color) are being denied access to higher education.”

Pushing low-income students out of the educational pipeline can only further entrench an increasingly immobile class system. A New York Times column from last month assembled some alarming data on the relationship between education and inequality. In 1970, 6.2 percent of students from low-income families attained a bachelor’s degree by the age of 24, compared to 40.2 percent of students from high-income families. By 2009, 82.4 of students from high-income families had completed a bachelor’s by age 24, but only 8.3 percent of students from low-income families were able to do so. Given that workers with a bachelor’s degree earn 82.8 percent more annually than workers with only a high school diploma, low-income youth are increasingly fated to remain low-income for their entire lives.

Remember, the Truman Commission warned us about this in 1947. When education is “prerequisite to occupational and social advance,” but is available only to the affluent, it will “become the means, not of eliminating race and class distinctions, but of deepening and solidifying them.”

With just over half of all entering community college students requiring developmental education courses, dev ed remains a main point of access to higher education. As we continue our push to improve the outcomes for students in these programs, we must not allow these programs to be rationed or slashed. Well-structured reforms can lead developmental education programs to accomplish what they are intended to do: help students, regardless of background and level of preparation, obtain a credential or degree and put them on the path to economic stability. As Carey explains, “opening the doors of higher education to ever more Americans is a perpetually unfinished project. But it’s a tragedy that we are simply choosing to watch some of those doors swing shut.”

Burning Bridges

A new report released this week by Complete College America (CCA) drawing on recent Community College Research Center studies and data from CCA states, is recommending major changes to developmental education programs at two- and four-year colleges to secure better outcomes—in both cost and credentials—for students. From administering assessments in high school, to using multiple diagnostics for placement, to instituting co-requisite models that place students in college-level courses with built-in support, the report highlights promising practices from across the country. The title, REMEDIATION: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere, is provocative, to be sure, and the recommendations are bold—and boldness is certainly required when so few students who begin their postsecondary journey in developmental education actually complete it. However, that “bridge to nowhere” language undervalues the successes of reformers cheered in the report who are making the system work for their students—and doesn’t fully appreciate the hard work of students who are doing the best they can with the options they’ve got. We know sometimes the truth hurts, that sometimes someone has to schedule An Intervention, and sometimes feelings are going to be hurt before you can see the hard work that really has to be done. But if we’re going to burn this “bridge to nowhere,” we’re going to need some help rebuilding it. This new report has solid recommendations for the pieces of the structure, but this isn’t a “no assembly required” kind of project. Colleges and universities will need equally solid support for the execution of these new approaches.

Maybe what we’ve got is not so much a bridge to nowhere as a rickety one-lane bridge that needs to be an eight-lane superhighway (or maybe a track for a bullet train, or an easily accessible and frequently used bike path if we want to be carbon neutral). Whatever the path, it needs to lead to credentials that set students up for family-sustaining employment and career advancement, a point noted in the report, particular regarding getting students into career-tracked programs of study as soon as possible. While CCA encourages the critical commitment of state-level government in “Governors Who Get It,” and of state legislators, reform can’t be driven only from that arena. And it can’t be driven without any gas in the tank—the resources (financial and human) to implement them. We tend to agree with Nancy Zimpher, chancellor of SUNY, in Insider Higher Ed last week. Responding to legislation in Connecticut to end most remedial education in public higher education, Zimpher said, “I applaud Connecticut’s intent to abolish remediation, but this is not a legislative issue. It’s a community issue….” Mandates like the one proposed in Connecticut (which would eliminate traditional dev ed and replace it with embedded support in credit-bearing course and require college readiness bridge programs), while drawing on practices that are showing positive preliminary results, also must consider the complexity of this kind of change in a higher ed institution—especially given increasing resource constraints. Knowing what to do doesn’t mean you know how to do it, or that your current funding allocations can support it. Such reform must take into consideration the extensive professional development that will be required to ensure that new programs are delivered effectively, as well of the cost of that training. Also essential to successful implementation will be federal, state, and institutional policy changes that align funding with new models of instruction, among other structural changes. Finally, bringing faculty along in the process (or leaving them out) can have significant impact on the success of new initiatives and the students who participate. (Katie Hern of the California Acceleration Project, one of the reformers lifted up in the CCA report—and deservedly so!—wrote about the necessity of faculty engagement in reform efforts here.) Changing the delivery mechanism probably won’t be much more effective if those doing the delivery feel like they haven’t been part of the decision-making process and feel that they don’t have the support they need to be successful.

DEI colleges and states have been hard at work on many of the CCA-recommended practices over the course of the initiative, and they’ve seen good results for their students. They’ve also experienced the sometimes labored process of building relationships across previously siloed departments, of responding at the system and institutional level to state-wide changes, and of fine-tuning messaging—repeatedly—for students, faculty, and staff so everyone really understands what is at stake and how they can benefit from doing things in a new way. We commend Complete College America for making the case for a new approach and declaring their vision for the best way forward; we hope that policy makers responding to these recommendations will carefully consider an approach to implementing these bold changes that draws on experience throughout a college, and that they’ll provide the resources—human, financial, and capital—to build a bridge to college completion that is long-lasting and gets individuals, institutions and our nation where we need to go.

Replicating Impact

Today, we’re returning to our “SCALERS: Round 2” series. Originally created by Paul Bloom, the SCALERS model identifies seven organizational capacities that support the successful scaling of a social enterprise: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. (You can read an introduction to each driver in our first SCALERS series.) Now, we’re asking DEI colleges about how particular SCALERS drivers have contributed to their scaling efforts. We’ve looked at staffing. communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, and earnings generation. In the post below, Becky Ament, associate dean for developmental education at Zane State College, discusses how Zane State went about replicating the impact of their intrusive advising approach for developmental education students.

When Zane State College joined Achieving the Dream in 2005, initial data analysis suggested interventions with two groups of students had the greatest potential to improve the year-to-year retention rates:

• Students who tested two levels below college level math, but failed to complete at least one developmental class during their first year in college; nearly 100 percent of students who fell into this category were not retained from one fall to the next.
• Students most at risk for dropping out as measured by the Noel-Levitz College Student Inventory (CSI); students scoring highest (7, 8, or 9) in “dropout proneness” on the CSI were significantly less likely to be retained from one fall to the next.

The resulting interventions were:

• Developmental math advising: Developmental student outcome data indicated strong course retention and successful completion rates as well as strong success rates in targeted gatekeeper courses. Confident that the curriculum was well aligned and meeting students’ needs, new intervention strategies focused on intrusive advising. Academic advisors developed an unmet prerequisite intervention process that monitors students’ participation in developmental mathematics through enrollment and completion of a college-level math course. Any student not attending or dropping out of a developmental mathematics course was targeted for intervention advising and required to continue the appropriate sequence of developmental and college-level math courses. In two years this intervention resulted in a 5 percent increase in students successfully completing developmental math courses within their first year. By 2008, the increase grew to 10 percent.

• Advising for students most at-risk: This program provides personal contacts and individual support to students scoring in a high profile range for “drop-out proneness.” Advisors interpret the CSI results for the students immediately upon completion during the placement test session and discuss support options for counseling, tutoring, and communicating with a contact person who cares about the student’s entire experience and success. Student Success Center personnel maintain contacts within the first three weeks of the student’s first term and then at least quarterly throughout the student’s first year to assist them with support plans as needed. Analysis of the 2007 cohort showed a 16 percent increase in fall-to-fall retention of the high-risk group as a result of this intervention. 

Coupled with both of these approaches are early alert referrals from faculty to initiate intervention advising during the course of a term.

The Developmental Education Initiative afforded Zane State the opportunity to build on these initial successes and scale the intrusive advising program. The comprehensive intervention program touches all developmental students in some way, from the initial group placement test and CSI interpretation sessions to the intrusive interventions. Despite significant enrollment growth, the CSI case management style intervention has been maintained by employing three part-time paraprofessional advisors in the Success Center to make the personal student contacts and refer students to professional support services as needed. Their work frees time for the professional advisors to focus on the other interventions. To ensure quality service delivery, advisors and paraprofessional advisors participated in orientation sessions with the director of the Student Success Center. The academic advisors in the Success Center who had been working with the various interventions then trained the new advisors. Additionally, the new academic advisor attended a National Academic Advising Association event for further professional development. The unmet prerequisite intervention for math has been expanded to developmental reading and English with the addition of another academic advisor.

Collectively, all of these initiatives are contributing to the goal of improved first year fall-to-fall retention rates: data have shown that students who began one fall and returned the following fall had a three-year graduation rate of 87 percent.

Come and Get It!

Hey blog readers! There's some new material in the Resources section of the Developmental Education Initiative website. The DEI team at Cuyahoga Community College has agreed to share three pieces that they've developed as part of their DEI work. In the "Curricular and Instructional Revisions" category you'll find:

• two manuals chock full of cooperative learning activities for developmental English courses. There are exercises to get students talking about reading and writing, as well as ideas for forming groups and evaluating group dynamics--and much more!

• a supplemental instruction leader training manual. This one covers student-to-student interactions, session planning, session activities, and case studies

 Many thanks to Cuyahoga for being willing to share this great work. Remember, if you use the manuals, please give the authors credit for their effort.

This Week in Links: Equity, Policy, Analytics, and Peeps!

• Sara Goldrick-Rab posted this week about the assault on community colleges (and, by extension, on equity): “That's right—students are showing up at ‘open door’ colleges and being effectively turned away.  Welcome to the ‘new normal.’”
• Getting Past Go posted a video on Tuesday of Katie Hern’s presentation to the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO). Katie, previously featured on Accelerating Achievement and director of the California Acceleration Project, gives a five-point policy agenda:

1. Set a statewide policy directive that limits the amount of time students spend in remediation
2. Incentivize colleges to develop accelerated pathways in reading/writing, ESL, and math
3. Fund professional development to train faculty to develop and teach in new accelerated models
4. Maintain a commitment to access while increasing completion – we need to cut the lower levels from our remedial sequences, not the students unlucky enough to be placed there
5.  Reject solutions focusing on the need for more and better placement testing, including “diagnostic testing.”

• The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is “designing a system that will incorporate institutional records going back to 2008 on the longitudinal performance of cohorts of students designated for developmental mathematics at each of the 30 colleges participating in [their] community college mathematics pathways initiative. These data constitute a baseline for understanding institutional performance over time, for establishing college-by-college improvement targets, and for exploring the antecedents and conditions of performance going forward.” They are also “prototyping continuous data feed reports to faculty on their classroom context and individual student progress.” Pretty cool stuff.
• Remember last year, when we were inspired by the Washington Post’s Peeps Diorama Contest to use peeps to demonstrate key developmental education reforms, like contextualization and a strong peer support network? Sadly, we don’t have any new dev ed peep-oramas this year. But be sure to check out the winners of this year’s Washington Post Peeps Diorama contest.