DEI: What We Know

States and colleges in the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) completed their grant program last December. While they are all moving ahead with many of their expanded developmental education efforts, we took some time to look back on what we’ve all learned over the past three years about scaling up successful innovations and the importance of strong leadership at the top. In a two-part publication, What We Know, MDC lifts up the successes of the DEI colleges from the perspective of presidents and project directors. The two pieces are summarized here:

What We Know: Reflections from Developmental Education Initiative Presidents
Edited by Madeline Patton
The Developmental Education Initiative asked 15 college leaders to take what they’d learned in early Achieving the Dream efforts and apply that to the challenge of scaling up: what resources, policies, and practices are essential to scaling up effective developmental education efforts? Finding ways to move more students through developmental education more quickly—or bypass it altogether—while maintaining successful student outcomes required leadership and commitment from every level of the organization. In this essay collection, the presidents of the 15 DEI colleges reflect on what they learned about building, embedding, and maintaining systemic change in their institutions—particularly in the difficult field of developmental education—through work with their trustees, students, faculty, staff, and community. They discuss how they and their colleges took on identifying successful innovations and scaling them up in the midst of leadership transitions, serious reductions in financial resources, and major changes in organizational structure.

What We Know: Lessons from the Developmental Education Initiative
In February 2012, MDC convened DEI college teams composed of faculty, administrators, and presidents. We mixed them up—different colleges, different states, different roles—and asked them to create the ideal path for underprepared students to get from college entry to credential completion. Drawing on their collective knowledge, particularly what they’d learned during DEI, the teams considered four points of interaction with students or potential students: early intervention and access, advising and support services, developmental education instruction, and alignment with credential and degree programs. Six teams and six hours later, we had six designs that displayed a remarkable amount of consensus about the programs, policies, and institutional supports needed to help any student be successful on the path from college enrollment to credential completion. This piece synthesizes our DEI college teams’ recommended best program bets and related critical institutional policies for helping all students succeed at what they set out to accomplish in community college.

We’re grateful to the presidents and college project directors for their contributions to and hard work on both of these pieces. We hope you’ll read them, share them, and make connections to your own work and learning. You can download copies of both What We Know pieces here on the MDC website.

Coming Soon: Publications Highlight Lessons Learned from the Developmental Education Initiative

The three-year Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) is drawing to a close. While the participating colleges and states are moving ahead with many of their expanded developmental education efforts, this also is a time to reflect on what we’ve learned over the last three years. We wanted to alert you to four upcoming publications from DEI partners that will delve into questions about success, challenges, and insights into where college, state, and funder priorities ought to be going forward. These publications, summarized below, will be released over the next three months. We’ll alert you when they hit the streets! We hope you’ll read them, share them, and make connections to your own work and learning.
 
Bringing Developmental Education to Scale: Lessons from the Developmental Education Initiative
Janet C. Quint, Shanna S. Jaggars, D. Crystal Byndloss, and Asya Magazinnik, MDRC and Community College Research Center
This second and final report from the official evaluation of the DEI colleges examines the degree to which the institutions scaled up their chosen developmental education reforms to serve more students, the factors that affected their ability to expand these programs and practices, and the extent to which these strategies were associated with improved student outcomes. It also considers ways that participation in DEI influenced the colleges more broadly. For these reasons, it may be of interest to other colleges looking to scale-up reforms, especially those related to instruction and the provision of student supports, as well as to funders concerned about how best to help community colleges bring promising ideas to scale. The evaluation, conducted by MDRC and its partner, the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University, draws on both qualitative data (primarily interviews with key personnel at all 15 institutions) and quantitative data (information on participation and on student outcomes that the colleges regularly collected).
 
Ahead of the Curve: State Success in the Developmental Education Initiative
David Altstadt for Jobs for the Future
Building on their work through Achieving the Dream, six states and 15 community colleges joined the Developmental Education Initiative in 2009 to take on the daunting challenge of improving the success of students who enter the community college academically underprepared. Teams from the six DEI states— Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Virginia —working with Jobs for the Future, which has managed the DEI state policy effort, co-developed an ambitious, evidence-based state policy framework to guide large-scale, multi-faceted reforms in how community colleges provide underprepared students with the skills they need to succeed in college courses. Three years later, with the initiative winding down, these states have made significant progress in adopting the DEI policy recommendations and, as a result, they have augmented, accelerated, and spread developmental education systems change across their community colleges. Ahead of the Curve spotlights the major policy accomplishments of the Developmental Education Initiative by profiling specific innovations in each of the six states and by documenting the degree to which these states have pursued common strategies and policy levers contained in the initiative’s systems-change framework.
 
Presidential Reflections: What DEI Taught Us
Edited by Madeline Patton for MDC
The Developmental Education Initiative asked 15 college leaders to take what they’d learned in early Achieving the Dream efforts and apply that to the challenge of scaling up: what resources, policies, and practices are essential to scaling up effective developmental education efforts? Finding ways to move more students through developmental education more quickly—or bypass it altogether—while maintaining successful student outcomes required leadership and commitment from every level of the organization. In this essay collection, the presidents of the 15 DEI colleges reflect on what they learned about building, embedding, and maintaining systemic change in their institutions—particularly in the difficult field of developmental education— through work with their trustees, students, faculty, staff, and community. They discuss how they and their colleges took on identifying successful innovations and scaling them up in the midst of leadership transitions, serious reductions in financial resources, and major changes in organizational structure.

What We Know: A Synthesis of DEI College Learning
Abby Parcell, MDC, and Cynthia Ferrell, Community College Leadership Program
In February 2012, MDC convened DEI college teams composed of faculty, administrators, and presidents. We mixed them up—different colleges, different states, different roles—and asked them to create the ideal path for underprepared students to get from college entry to credential completion. Drawing on their collective knowledge, particularly what they’d learned during DEI, the teams considered four points of interaction with students or potential students: early intervention and access, advising and support services, developmental education instruction, and alignment with credential and degree programs. Six teams and six hours later, we had six designs that displayed a remarkable amount of consensus about the programs, policies, and institutional supports needed to help any student be successful on the path from college enrollment to credential completion. What We Know is a synthesis of our DEI experts’ recommended best program bets, and related critical institutional policies for helping all students succeed at what they set out to accomplish in community college.

Improving Student Success at Sinclair CC: Lessons from Three Initiatives

In today’s post, Kathleen Cleary, associate provost for student success at Sinclair Community College, recaps her presentation from the June 2012 Conference on Developmental Education sponsored by the National Center for Postsecondary Research. Kathleen recounts how Sinclair’s student success efforts have evolved through the institutional change work of Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative, setting them up for statewide transformation as part of the Completion By Design network.

When Sinclair began our work with Achieving the Dream (ATD) in 2005, we opted to infuse ATD principles and goals into standing college processes and systems to avoid perceptions that this was an “add-on” to existing work. The strength of this work is that we approached improving student success, particularly for underserved populations, as a way of life at the college, rather than a program that would have a beginning and ending. With the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI), we pushed the envelope of possibility even further and began to make bolder, more aggressive changes in our pedagogy, structures, and curriculum. When we learned that we were granted funding for Completion by Design (CBD), we took a different approach and made the conscious decision to be high profile, even creating a statewide Completion by Design office on campus. The evolution of our student success work is built on the solid, data-driven, culture-changing work of ATD, through groundbreaking efforts in DEI, to a systemic, campus-wide ownership of the need to move the needle on student outcomes in Completion by Design.

The gains for Achieving the Dream centered on use of data, policy changes, and a commitment to enhancing teaching and learning. Faculty began tracking student success in gatekeeper courses in developmental and college-level English, reading, and math. When faculty saw their success rates, they began to experiment with new ways of teaching and structuring courses. Policy changes such as the no late registration policy were watershed moments for the college as we made a cultural shift from an access-centric institution to an access and success focus. Another hallmark of our ATD work was the creation of the Center for Teaching and Learning, which has provided professional development on topics including student engagement, diversity in the classroom, and increasing student success and completion. Through such DEI initiatives as boot camps, math modules, accelerated English, and early support in high school, we began to accelerate students’ progress through developmental education, while continually tracking student success into the next course in the sequence. The work of ATD and DEI became the cornerstone for Completion by Design both at Sinclair and across the state of Ohio. The goal is to create a seamless pathway for students that helps them graduate in higher numbers and more quickly, with fewer excess credits.

The four strategic priorities for the state have their roots in the ATD/DEI colleges of Ohio:

1.    Academic Program Redesign and Contextualization
2.    Accelerating Students through the Pathway
3.    Integrated Student Support and Development
4.    Institutional and State Policies

All four of these priorities have already been addressed through the ATD and DEI colleges in Ohio and are the natural choices for the state’s continuing student success work with the Completion by Design colleges. While Sinclair is the only Ohio CBD college to be involved in all three initiatives, the work reflects the lessons learned by colleges across the state in all three initiatives. It is an exciting time to be working with community colleges as students across Ohio and the nation are poised to graduate in greater numbers as a result of the exciting findings of this work.

Patrick Henry Community College: Predicting Success

We’re indebted to Greg Hodges, dean of developmental education and transitional programs, and Kevin Shropshire, director of institutional research, at Patrick Henry Community College for their contributions to this post.

In 2009, at the beginning of their Developmental Education Initiative grant, Patrick Henry Community College planned two different strategies for accelerating students’ progress through developmental education: Fast Track math that allowed students to complete two dev math courses in one semester and Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) courses, based on the model pioneered at the Community College of Baltimore County. PHCC knew that these different accelerated strategies weren’t a perfect fit for every student and wanted a way for advisors to assess which students would be most likely to succeed in these courses. They created a computer-based predictor tool with an easy-to-use interface that was built on top of a database that calculated a student’s likelihood of success based on his/her response to a series of questions asked during an advising visit. Preliminary results with the tool were promising. And then the Virginia Community College System launched a system-wide redesign of developmental mathematics that essentially fast-tracked all students, with a requirement to complete all dev math in one year, using a series of nine modules and a new diagnostic instrument. Here’s the story of the early days of the advising tool and how PHCC plans for revisions that will enable them to continue using it to place students in the appropriate type of acceleration.

Version One
PHCC first deployed the predictor tool in fall 2010. In the past, the assessment of advising at the college was difficult because different advisors focused on different characteristics to guide students to specific courses; thus, trying to sort out which student characteristics and situations would affect success in a particular instructional method was nearly impossible. The advising tool—and the database on which it is built—provides for consistency of some key variables and documents decision-making of different advisors. Variables included: 

• expected absences
• expected use of tutorial services
• placement test scores, including math, reading, and writing
• previous developmental math success .

The database returned a statistical likelihood (high, medium, low) of a student’s success in an accelerated course. (The key characteristics and probabilities were based on a risk model of prior students’ behaviors and rates of success.) Here’s a screen shot of the interface created by the college's webmaster:

An advisor considered this computer-driven recommendation along with his/her own professional judgment, and the student’s perspective to make a proactive decision about acceleration possibilities that were in the best interest of the student. 

Preliminary data suggested promise—and the need for some refinements. In fall 2010, the pass rate for Fast Track students with a record in the database (meaning the advisors used the advising database), was 82 percent. The rate for students with no records in the database (those that enrolled on their own or whose advisors did not use the advising database) was 65 percent. This suggests the possibility that the advising system helped advisors identify students who were more likely to be successful in this accelerated course.

The input predictor model was 80-85 percent accurate, mainly driven by student absences. In addition, the predictor can also be applied to all students at the end of a semester, though it must be acknowledged that some of the inputs—like math lab visits and expected absences—are student-driven. These estimates can then be correlated with student success measures such as course success and retention.

Redesign the Curriculum – Redesign the Predictor
The folks at Patrick Henry weren’t the only Virginians doing DEI work. In 2009 -2010, the Virginia Community College System convened a state-wide task force and redesigned the entire developmental mathematics curriculum. (You can read about the redesign here.) When the final curriculum was launched at all VCCS colleges in January of 2012, content that was once delivered in 3-4 credit developmental courses was now captured in nine one-credit modules, with the aim that all developmental math course work could be completed in one year. That meant that acceleration became the norm—not just one of many options—at Patrick Henry. And that meant that a predictor that might recommend a traditional, non-accelerated course for a student was no longer the right tool for advisors.
However, PHCC was confident that there was still great value in advisors having more information on which to base advising recommendations. Since VCCS allowed colleges to decide on the delivery mechanisms for the new developmental math modules, PHCC undertook three different delivery options for the new VA math: face-to-face instruction, computer-based instruction, and ALP (combining developmental with on-level coursework). This summer and fall they will be hard at work creating and implementing a revised predictor that will help advisors counsel students about their best instructional option. They have already identified some key characteristics that affect student success in the different course models.

We’re looking forward to seeing how the next iteration of the predictor shapes up. We’ll be sure to update our blog readers. If you’re interested in more specifics about how the college built their model, please contact Greg Hodges at ghodges@patrickhenry.edu or Kevin Shropshire at kshropshire@patrickhenry.edu. (Achieving the Dream colleges: they’re even willing to share SAS code that’s already set up for ATD data!)

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.

One More D.R.E.A.M.: On the Road Again

Today, one final dispatch from last week's trip to Dallas. Richard Hart, MDC communications director, wrote this after attending one of the fantastic concurrent sessions at D.R.E.A.M.

The most exciting thing I learned during a presentation last week by Zane State College about the college’s innovations in developmental education during D.R.E.A.M. (Achieving the Dream’s inspiring confab on student success), was this: the students seem to really like what Zane State’s doing.

That, and developmental education instructors from around the country are apparently big fans of Willie Nelson.

Becky Ament, associate dean for developmental education at Zane State, and Beth Fischer, director of institutional research and planning at the college, talked about the evolution of the college’s compressed dev ed math courses and their dev ed courses linked to college-level classes, together a program they call “ADVANCE.”  In a nutshell, Becky and Beth walked the packed room through the successes and initial limitations of ADVANCE, which includes voluntary case management, on-campus promotion, and higher retention and completion rates for students who take advantage of the program. (Their PowerPoint presentation will be uploaded to the ATD website soon.)

But one of the less quantifiable benefits of the program seems to be the students’ response. Becky and Beth played videos of interviews done with students after they’d been through the program to record their reactions, and they were remarkably positive (with Becky and Beth reassuring the crowd that the students hadn’t been prompted).

“They develop a lot more friendships and collaborative relationships,” Becky said about students who took dev ed English along with a linked sociology class.

One student interviewed said before classes began she was nervous about her just-in-time dev ed instruction that was paced to meet the needs of her linked college-level course. She didn’t like or understand the program at first, but by the time it was over she realized: “It’s really fun.” Another benefit for students, Becky explained: taking the paired courses at the same time cuts a student’s costs.

There were challenges along the way, such as a shortage of advisers, lower-than-expected enrollment at first, inadequate promotion, some reluctant faculty, and the failure of ADVANCE classes to appear on the “live” course schedule. Dev ed faculty who attended the session offered lots of (solicited) advice, such as: make it mandatory, find out the times that are most convenient for students, and involve more faculty who support the program.
Things were already looking up by the second year, as advisors were fully integrated into the program, courses made it onto the “live” schedule, and promotion was increased. The ADVANCE program was developed with support from the Developmental Education Initiative, and Becky and Beth assured the group that the program would continue beyond the end of its DEI grant this year—and said the courses are even making money for the school.

And what’s that about Willie Nelson? Between breaks in the presentation, Beth hit the “play” button on her laptop and Willie’s voice rang out, singing “On the Road Again.” When she’d occasionally forget to hit the button, the crowd shouted “Play Willie!” By then, the students weren’t the only ones having fun.

I Had the Best DREAM!

We’re back at MDC’s offices in Durham, NC after a great week in Dallas, TX for DREAM 2012. Our brains and notebooks are overflowing with ideas and observations, but here are some quick highlights:

• Thursday’s lunch featured a great student panel—so much ambition and intellect! Our favorite line: when an audience member asked what would make the experience better, one of the students said “They should have an advisor just for old people!” Another student likened his college to an ocean—vast and full of yet to be discovered secrets.
• The student Twitter team and the videographers were energetic, friendly and prolific.
• The student designed tee-shirts? Awesome.
• Learning about Cuyahoga Community College’s Student Ambassadors and how they are becoming peer mentors—and helping their fellow students be more successful.
• Often the first step in promoting financial management strategies at your college is helping students, faculty and administration understand the true financial barriers students face. Phillips Community College has done this through running a poverty simulation for its faculty and CCBC uses a video which explains the financial challenges students face. 
• A presentation from Isaac Rowlett and Jyoti Gupta of Public Agenda highlighted the many ways in which colleges can engage their communities to advance student success. A key challenge to overcome: making sure that you invite the right people to be part of your planning efforts, not just the usual suspects who you have worked with in the past.
• We briefly covered the equity panel discussion in our previous post, but here’s a great recap from the Community College Times.
• North Central State College wins our vote for best session title: Scaling Up Math and English Boot Camps (or Are These Boot Camps Made for Walking?) Apparently, Nancy Sinatra was a featured participant. You can download slides and handouts from ALL of the DREAM sessions here.

Were you at DREAM, too? Share your highlights in the comments section!

I D.R.E.A.M. of Dallas

We’ll be headed to Dallas next week for D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. Check out the agenda here; you’ll find many of our DEI colleges presenting on a variety of topics: scaling up math boot camps and accelerated courses, dev ed redesigns, ePortfolios, structured learning communities, how to organize faculty and staff across campus for a coordinated approach to student success—and much more. And we’ll be leading a spotlight session about bringing innovation to scale.

If you’re going, come find us at the Success Fair and check out some new DEI material; if you’re following from afar, we’ll keep you updated here on the blog and on Twitter. The event has its very own hashtag: #DREAM2012.

Many Happy Returns

Today’s blog birthday post is brought to you by the letter S. We look back at Accelerating Achievement posts on two of our favorite topics: scaling and state policy.

In Scaling Up, we’ve been harvesting the latest thinking on scaling from the social innovation field, calling attention to tools and resources that can help colleges and states increase the impact of developmental education advancements. We’ve also highlight stories of colleges and states that have found ways to expand the reach of promising practices. The Joy of Scaling launched a seven-week series on seven organizational capacities that support successful scaling of a social enterprise, represented by the acronym SCALERS: Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-building, Lobbying, Earnings Generation, Replicating Impact, and Stimulating Market Forces. MDC adapted this model from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business for use in community colleges. An ongoing series is delving deeper into the individual SCALERS, seeing how they apply to supplemental instruction, self-paced courses, and faculty engagement.

Supportive state policy is an essential component in any institutional plan to expand innovation to more students. This year’s Statewise posts have followed DEI state policy teams, coordinated by Jobs For the Future, as they work within state community college systems and legislatures to change outdated rules, funding, and incentive structures that stand in the way of innovation. Michael Collins, associate vice president of postsecondary state policy at JFF, laid out the Developmental Education Initiative State Policy strategy in a three-part series. The first segment showed how collecting the right data can inform state policy to accelerate dev ed innovation across a system. Part two detailed how states are investing resources in that innovation. The final installment, our most read Statewise post, made the case for a continuous improvement cycle focused on strengthening policy supports.

Finding ways to bring what works to more students will remain a vital concern for higher education—and for Accelerating Achievement—as colleges and states continue to face increasing enrollments, diminishing resources, and intensifying pressure to move students to credentials more quickly and efficiently.

Birthday Wish: Equal Opportunity

Today, Accelerating Achievement turns one. This week, we’re looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.

There’s a lot going on in the DEI network of colleges, states, and partners. All year, we’ve been highlighting learnings from our exchanges of information and ideas in DEI Dispatches. Our What’s Up with DEI series featured the work of all fifteen colleges and six states; one week last May, we brought you daily posts from a few practitioners who work at the intersection of equity and postsecondary completion. We kicked off that week with The Ladder of Educational Opportunity, which reminded us that supporting programmatic and policy innovations can help ensure developmental education programs 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 Americans, we pride ourselves on being members of a society where equal opportunity offers everyone a chance at success. But mounting evidence suggests that children born into low-income families are not likely to ever improve their economic security. In a speech last Thursday, Alan Krueger, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, illustrated the lack of social mobility in America:

Studies find that your parent’s income is a good predictor of your subsequent income. Studies that use income data averaged over longer periods of time for parents and children tend to find higher correlations between parental and children’s income. A reasonable summary is that the correlation between parents’ and their children’s income is around 0.50. This is remarkably similar to the correlation that Sir Francis Galton found between parents’ height and their children’s height over 100 years ago. This fact helps to put in context what a correlation of 0.50 implies. The chance of a person who was born to a family in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution rising to the top 10 percent as an adult is about the same as the chance that a dad who is 5’6” tall having a son who grows up to be over 6’1” tall. It happens, but not often.

Why is it that so few low-income young people are able to advance in America? The readers of this blog know from experience that our education system, the keystone of our society’s meritocracy, has fallen on hard times. The pipeline that carries students from childhood to postsecondary education and living-wage work is leaky, damaged, and archaic. A postsecondary credential is now more vital than ever for finding work, but the majority of students who enroll at community colleges are not prepared for college-level courses. Too many students who need developmental education never progress on to a credential. Dev ed practitioners and policy-makers know that as long as our dev ed programs allow so many students to stagnate, social mobility will remain low. Promising innovations all around the country are getting more students quickly through these programs and on to credit-bearing courses, but they need to be expanded and replicated. Transforming dev ed from a barrier and a burden for underprepared students to a stepping stone toward achievement will restore a crucial rung on the ladder of opportunity.

Every birthday girl needs a network

We’re paging through our first year of Accelerating Achievement posts, pulling out some reader favorites and seeing what’s new. Today, we return to two posts from colleagues not directly associated with DEI, but from institutions that are committed to the same work. We’ve learned a lot this year from people throughout the community college sector and beyond.

Through In the News we’ve followed developmental education media coverage and spiced it up with conversation starters and a little analysis. In Take a Load Off, we recapped a great webinar from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning about the Foundation’s work on Statway and Quantway, two pathways to help take developmental math students “to and through” transferrable college math in one year. One big takeaway came from Uri Treisman:

“We need to sit back and not let the weight of history determine what we’re teaching. The weight of history plays too much of a role in these courses, more than our own best professional judgment, learning sciences, or the needs of the workforce.”

Both initiatives have made great strides in the last year; you can hear all about the progress during the Foundation’s upcoming January 24 webinar.


Innovation Highlight segments introduced colleges and states that are developing new strategies to get students through dev ed successfully. We’ve discussed learning communities, supplemental instruction, tutoring, acceleration and the data collection that undergirds any improvement.

One of the most popular posts came from Katie Hern at Chabot College. In Mobilizing Faculty toward Dramatic Curricular Change, Katie shared what she has learned about motivating individuals to take on the challenge of accelerated developmental education courses as an English instructor and lead of the California Acceleration Project. Hearing from faculty at different colleges, teaching in different disciplines and different modalities has been one of our favorite parts of this last year of blogging!

Happy Birthday, Accelerating Achievement!

This week, Accelerating Achievement turns one. According to What to Expect the First Year, we should have nail-trimming, sleep schedules, and solid foods all figured out. In addition to those milestones, we’ve had more than 100 posts ranging from explanations of how successful bridge programs work, to ways that data can be used to influence state policy, to an invitation for skeptics to change the way they think about developmental education. Forty-two of those were guest posts written by community college faculty, higher education researchers, workforce development experts, state policy leaders, and other friends from across the education sector. Over the next few days, we’re going to do some birthday reflecting, looking back at some of the year’s highlights and thinking about where the next year will take us.


Our Talking About Dev Ed section features posts that explore the varied definitions and passionate opinions that can make conversations about developmental education tricky. In What's in a Name?, we introduced some developmental education messaging tools and general advice for discussing developmental education with any audience. The tools include talking points tailored to key audiences, an economic appeal for supporting the success of underprepared students, and a way to talk about the essential coordination of institutional innovation and state policy. You can find all of these docs in the Resources section of our website under “Communications.” As we move into an election year, there will—we hope!—be more meaningful dialogue about the connections among educational success, employment security, and civil society. These resources could be useful as you participate in these conversations.


In Tales of Technical Assistance, we turned the spotlight on our DEI colleges that are making taking advantage of expert consultation to overcome barriers to expanding effective programs. One success story on the continuous improvement loop came from El Paso Community College (EPCC), as recorded in What Do Students Really Think? EPCC invited Arleen Arnsparger, consultant for the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program, to come to campus and lead a workshop about creating student focus groups. “We’re all getting better at making decisions by looking at institutional data and survey data, rather than just anecdotal information,” says Arleen. “Colleges have a lot of numbers to point them in the right direction, but student focus groups help them dig a little deeper into what they’re seeing in the data.” El Paso has continued to incorporate students into their decision-making process and as peer mentors. You can see a recap of their DEI progress here.

Prior Learning Assessment Event Next Week

Does your institution offer credit for prior learning? Would you like to explore the option? The Center for American Progress is hosting “Prior Learning Assessments: College Strategies for the Success of 21st Century Students” next Wednesday, September 28, 2011, 10:00am – 12:00pm EDT. From the event description on their website:

There are upstart leaders in higher education who are blazing a trail in the effective use of PLAs that helps students succeed in college by rewarding learning wherever it occurs. Today’s session takes an in-depth look at these solutions at both the systemic and individual institution level. How did they get started? How are they demonstrating effectiveness? What models do they suggest for best practice replication?

If you’re planning on being in DC, they’d love to have you drop by. If not, you can link to the live stream from this site.

What’s Up with DEI: Patrick Henry Community College

For the past month and a half, we’ve been sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’ve made our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. Yesterday, we introduced Virginia’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville, Virginia.

Patrick Henry Community College (PHCC) serves almost 3,000 students in the city of Martinsville and in Patrick, Henry, and Franklin Counties. 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 the projected goal for increased use of cooperative learning in the classroom; cooperative learning is becoming a standard teaching methodology for PHCC, with nearly 2000 students enrolled in courses that used this methodology in 2010-11. In order to better measure the effectiveness of cooperative learning, faculty trainers and institutional research staff have developed comprehensive survey instruments for faculty and student participants. The surveys have undergone one round of validation to date. The final validated survey will be administered in fall 2011.
• PHCC also exceeded its targets for enrollments in fast-track math and accelerated learning program courses. Pass rates in accelerated and traditional math courses were 59 percent and 54 percent. Pass rates in accelerated and traditional English courses were 73 percent and 54 percent. The college anticipates enrollment in ALP courses to increase tremendously, due in part to the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) Developmental Education Redesign Initiative.
• Patrick Henry has established the Southern Center for Active Learning Excellence (SCALE) to provide training to other educators on campus and across the country. The college is developing a business plan to establish SCALE as a self-sustaining unit through the PHCC Foundation.

Institutional Policy

• The college is adopting a PHCC-designed student success prediction model as part of its dual enrollment program to advise entering high school students.
• Policy changes that the college has implemented to support the success of underprepared students include: increased funds available for tutoring purposes; incorporating COMPASS Test Preparation Workshops into the responsibilities of the Integrated Advising, Testing and Career Center; providing emergency funding from the PHCC Foundation for students, targeting low-income and first generation students; and paying adjunct faculty who complete cooperative learning professional development training a higher per credit hourly rate.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Professional development is imperative and has contributed to the success of PHCC’s DEI work, including training for full-time and adjunct faculty and staff in cooperative learning and accelerated learning methods, use of the new advising model, use of technology (MyMath Lab, MyWritingLab, and iPads), and an annual data summit attended by faculty, staff, and administrators.

What’s Up with DEI: Danville Community College

For the past month and a half, we’ve been sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’ve made our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. Yesterday, we introduced Virginia’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Danville Community College in Danville, Virginia.

Danville Community College (DCC) serves more than 4,000 students in the city of Danville and Pittsylvania and Halifax Counties. 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

• All DCC developmental courses now include a technology component, and faculty members incorporate online homework assignments, require students to supplement classroom instruction with instructional videos, and encourage students to take advantage of online practice tests and tutoring. 
• At the beginning of their DEI work, the college served approximately 30 students in modular instruction. Now, approximately 200 students complete developmental math in four-week modules rather than the traditional 15-week program. With the Virginia Community College System (VCCS) math redesign that will be implemented in spring 2012, all developmental math students will be enrolled in math modules.

Institutional Policy

• Because of the major revisions to developmental math content in the VCCS, faculty teaching college-level courses are reviewing the content of the new nine math modules and determining which of the modules students need to be prepared for their first college-level math course and program of study. A course-by-course review will also be required no later than fall 2011 for new students enrolling in spring 2012. Descriptions of the new math modules have been shared with high schools in the service area.
• In 2010-2011, developmental education faculty conducted the first formal program review of developmental math and English, documenting assessment of specific learning outcomes, setting benchmarks, examining data, and using the data to make changes designed to improve student success.
• DCC has created a Developmental Education Advisory Committee with representatives from the local business community, public schools, and other educational institutions. At two meetings over the course of the year, participants discussed the challenges and opportunities facing potential partnerships between DCC and other educational institutions, business, and industry.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• The college has worked with Rose Asera, a DEI technical assistance provider, to design a Faculty Inquiry Group. Originally, faculty met to align curriculum between developmental and college-level courses and develop a writing rubric. The rubric has been shared with area high schools and adult basic education providers and used at DCC by developmental writing faculty and college-level faculty.

What’s Up with DEI: Virginia

For the past month and a half, we’ve been sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’ve made our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This week, we’re finishing the series with Virginia, the Old Dominion State.

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) serves as the state team lead for Virginia’s ATD/DEI state policy work. Two of the state’s 23 community colleges participate in DEI, Danville and Patrick Henry. Three others were Round 1 ATD colleges (Mountain Empire, Paul D. Camp, and Tidewater) and Northern Virginia became an ATD institution in 2007. In the last year, Virginia has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• In August 2010, the VCCS college presidents accepted the report and the recommendations from the developmental math redesign team, The Critical Point. VCCS also published its first annual Developmental Education Annual Report in February 2011.

Investment in Innovation

• VCCS has established a campus implementation team comprised of faculty from all 23 VCCS campuses, to work on the implementation of the new developmental math modules. This group will meet regularly in the coming year to address issues related to learning resources, scheduling, teaching load, delivery, and other topics that arise in the process of implementation.
• VCCS has designed two developmental education professional development opportunities:
• Developmental Education Symposium: An annual event held as a pre-conference to the system-wide professional development conference. This year, 175 developmental education faculty came together for a day-long working meeting.
• Developmental Education Institute: This event was held in June in partnership with the National Center for Developmental Education. The one-week summer institute for developmental education faculty is modeled after the nationally recognized Kellogg Institute.

Policy Supports

• In September 2010, the chancellor convened the Developmental English Redesign Team to examine the existing structure of developmental reading and writing in the VCCS and to make recommendations on how the model can be changed to increase student success. This is the same process that was undertaken for the developmental math redesign. The charge of the redesign team was to review policies and practices and make recommendations on what steps the system should take to redesign developmental reading and writing to improve student success and implement more streamlined and efficient ways of delivery. The report and recommendations were unanimously accepted by the college presidents at their April 2011 meeting and were endorsed by the State Board at their May meeting. The report was published in June 2011.

What’s Up with DEI: South Texas 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. Earlier this week, we introduced Texas’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about South Texas College in McAllen, Texas.

South Texas College (STC) serves nearly 30,000 students in Hidalgo and Starr Counties. 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

• South Texas has now integrated 40 percent of the developmental English and reading curriculum. They are focusing their work on increasing the depth of this initiative by creating additional developmental English essay prompts, to maintain faculty interest and enthusiasm about the approach. In general, this effort has resulted in more collaboration among the sociology, history, developmental English, developmental reading, and developmental math departments.
• During the first year of the grant activity, all fall 2009 full-time FTIC developmental English and reading students participated in the case management initiative, an expansion of an effort begun as part of STC’s Achieving the Dream work. This expansion resulted in case loads for the two DEI Student Success Specialists (SSS) at the South Texas College Pecan Campus that were too large (over 600 students for each SSS). The college has revised eligibility criteria to ensure that those that participate can benefit from the program. The new criteria resulted in case loads below 180 students. Under this approach, the pass rate for fall 2010 developmental reading students who received face to face contact was 74 percent, compared to 66 percent pass rate for the fall 2009 developmental reading students who received face-to-face contact—an increase of 8 percent. Similarly, the pass rate for fall 2010 developmental English students who received face-to-face contact was 80 percent, as compared to 68 percent pass rate for the fall 2009 developmental English students who received face-to-face contact—an increase of 12 percent.

Institutional Policy

• The integrated contextualized curriculum initiative supports one of STC’s Strategic Directions: “South Texas College proudly provides opportunities to all students with high expectations for their success.” Developmental studies students regularly enroll in non-developmental courses while they are completing their developmental coursework. Many instructors for these academic courses require students to write research papers. The additional emphasis on academic writing for developmental writing students through the implementation of the STC DEI Integrative Contextualized Curriculum  is an example of the instructors’ efforts to prepare students  for academic writing demands in non-developmental studies courses, even before these students have had the opportunity to take a college-level composition course.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• Modifications to the case management case loads were made, partially in response to feedback from a case management survey of the fall 2009 DEI cohort. After reducing case loads, survey responses for the fall 2010 showed greater awareness of the program.

What’s Up with DEI: Houston 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. Earlier this week, we introduced Texas’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Houston Community College in Houston, Texas.

Houston Community College (HCC) serves more than 70,000 students in the Houston area. 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

• Given positive results from an MDRC study of HCC learning community offerings and the college’s own analysis, HCC has increased learning community offerings from 10 percent of developmental math offerings in 2009-10 to 20 percent in 2010-2011, with plans for additional increases in the future. Successful course completion rates in learning community and non-learning community courses are 68 percent and 59 percent. The college also has plans for accelerated learning communities that will link the exit-level developmental math course with college algebra. HCC is promoting learning communities on their website right now; check out the tag line on their homepage.
• HCC has gradually increased student participation in a four-week math bridge courses from less than 50 students a semester to currently more than 200 per semester. The results continue to be very positive, with bridge course students having lower rates of attrition and higher rates of achievement and persistence. In spring 2011, students passed the bridge courses at a rate of 79 percent; the pass rate in traditional developmental math courses was 68 percent.

Institutional Policy

• To improve alignment of HCC course and program advising the college has implemented a web-based software called CurricUNET that facilitates the posting, development, revision, and archiving of all HCC curriculum.
• The college has developed an interactive web-based dashboard for 2010-2011 that allows users to check HCC progress in nine categories: access, completions, faculty ratios, financial aid, persistence/retention, placement, satisfaction, student engagement, and transfer. 
• HCC has made significant progress in aligning institutional policies and procedures to ensure better coordination of developmental education, including: automatic blocks on students’ registration for courses for which they have not satisfied pre-requisites, automatic drops of pre-registrants who have been placed on academic probation or suspension with mandatory academic advising and limitations on subsequent course-taking; creation of a new grade (FX) to identify students who fail a course because of lack of attendance; and development of a faculty advising handbook.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• The HCC Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence has developed numerous courses and workshops designed to assist faculty in implementation of DEI interventions:  Freshman Success: First Year Experience; Learning Communities in Community Colleges; Classroom Strategies for Developmental English; and Battle of the Book: Combating the Textbook Reading Resistance
• In Texas, there is currently no floor below which students are allowed to score on the COMPASS exam prior to admission into developmental reading classes. Consequently, the lowest level reading course has a very low success rate. The college is exploring re-testing of students in the tenth week of the semester to see if any progress has been achieved and if not, referring students to other more appropriate programs, Adult Education, ESL, VAST (a program at HCC for those with learning disabilities), or a CE program that incorporates literacy or ESL instruction.

What’s Up with DEI: El Paso 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 Texas’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas.

El Paso Community College (EPCC) serves nearly 30,000 students in El Paso County, Texas. 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

• Math emporiums have been implemented on all five campuses and each one has been, or is in the process of being, scaled up. The college is on pace to reach their target of having 30 percent of developmental math students enrolled in math emporiums by spring 2012 and will likely exceed that target by summer 2012. Students enrolled in math emporium sections from spring 2009 through fall 2010 successfully completed the course at the same rate as students enrolled in traditional developmental math sections, 67 percent. However, during that same period the withdrawal rate for students enrolled in math emporium sections was four percent less than that of students enrolled in traditional sections.
• EPCC is now serving more than 3000 students in PREP (Pre-testing Retesting Educational Preparation) program, and is on track to continue adding 500 or more students each semester. The PREP Program has become the backbone of the college’s case management system, providing the tracking needed to guide developmental education students through the attainment of their first 30 college credits. From fall 2009 to summer 2010 the percentage of students participating in the PREP Program who advanced at least one level in developmental education coursework is as follows: 65 percent math, 65 percent reading, and 47 percent writing.
• The case management system piloted at two campuses during the fall 2010 semester has now been implemented on all five campuses. The target population is students who test into all three developmental areas (math, reading and writing); there are now more than 2000 students in the system. Part of this approach involves encouraging students to participate in the EPCC mentoring program. The college currently has 250 mentors (faculty, staff, and students) working with 1,600 students and expects to decrease the mentor-to-student ratio as recruitment efforts are expanded.

Institutional Policy

• EPCC has committed to requiring all developmental education students to enroll in their developmental coursework and a student success course during the first year of their college experience. Procedures to implement this commitment will be in place by the fall 2011 semester.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• The college conducted centralized informational and training workshops for mentors at the beginning of the spring semester and will repeat those at the beginning of the fall 2011 semester.  During the semester, EPCC offered similar sessions on each campus, including a meet-and-greet to bring mentors and mentees together to exchange ideas and discuss concerns.

What’s Up with DEI: Coastal Bend 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 Texas’s state policy work; now it’s time to learn a bit more about Coastal Bend Community College in Beeville, TX.

Coastal Bend Community College (CBC) serves more than 3,000 students in nine rural counties in South Texas. 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

• Coastal Bend redefined case manager duties and hired a full-time case manager for both the Alice and Kingsville campuses. This allowed case managers to increase the number of students served, the number of contacts made, and the number of interventions offered to students.
• Sections of CBC’s Fast Track English and reading courses are now offered on three campuses, in back-to-back eight week sessions. The courses had a 96 percent course completion rate and an 88 percent course success rate (students who receive an A, B, or C grade). Almost all students testing into two levels of remediation completed both levels during the course. Additional course offerings have been added.
• The Accelerated English Learning Community has also been expanded to all four campuses.

Institutional Policy

• The Student Success Task Force was reinvigorated as the Student Success Team, solidifying this committee’s ongoing responsibility for the vision, oversight, and coordination of all student success work at CBC’s four campuses. A small workgroup, with representatives from all sectors of CBC personnel, meets routinely to address DEI-specific issues, review data, share success stories, and expand promising practices.
• The college has instituted a number of supportive policies, including: the elimination of late registration; all students are required to take an Accuplacer Review course before testing; and students who have remediation needs may not register for courses online, but must meet with an advisor for registration. The college instituted this policy for developmental math students as part of their Achieving the Dream work; the policy now extends to students testing into any developmental education subject area.

Academic and Supportive Service Innovations

• CBC invested in training for three new math instructors with limited experience working with developmental students, including monthly departmental meetings, professional development, software training, and an opportunity to make site visits to view successful models on other campuses or attend the National Association for Developmental Education (NADE) conference.