A Little of This; A Little of That

The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Higher Education (ISKME) is offering scholarships for their 2011 Big Ideas Fest. The conference is scheduled for December 4-7 in Half Moon Bay, California. The website describes the event as “a unique three-day immersion into collaboration and design with a focus on modeling cutting-edge thinking in K-20 education.” Last year, there were a few DEI folks in the house; Kathleen Cleary from Sinclair Community College described some of her experiences here on the DEI blog.

Registration for the conference is $695 (not including hotel and travel), but ISKME scholarships can cover some or all of that amount. Applications are due next Tuesday, November 15. You can link to the scholarship form here. ISKME encourages faculty, staff, and students to apply.
 
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We’ve featured the Chaffey College Opening Doors to Excellence (ODE) program a couple of times on Accelerating Achievement. ODE is a program designed to help probationary students get back in good standing and increase their chances for college success. This month, MDRC released four-year findings from their study of the program. While we were particularly interested in how Chaffey had scaled the program to reach their entire target population, now you can read more about program outcomes and cost-effectiveness. You can link to the full report here.
 
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Last week, Bruce Vandal from ECS and Brad Phillips of the Institute for Evidence-Based Change commented on the importance of aligning K-12 and postsecondary education at the state-level, especially as states tackle common core standards implementation. You can read a little more about—and link to—their Education Week article here on the Getting Past Go blog.

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

Linky, Linky!

• Yesterday on Confessions of a Community College Dean, Dean Dad blogged about boutique student success programs. “They can't scale up,” he says. “They work only so long as their per-student cost is off the charts. And those costs are covered by cutting other things.” Here at Accelerating Achievement, we agree that large-scale problems won’t be solved by small-scale programs. We’re hoping that our running series on the SCALERS model can help colleges think about program value AND feasibility as they scale-up small programs.  

• Over at the Getting Past Go blog, Bruce Vandal is keeping us updated about his visit to New Zealand to meet with postsecondary leaders. “New Zealand, like the United States, has recognized that it must increase the percentage of their residents who pursue and achieve postsecondary credentials,” he tells us. “And, like the U.S., they find that far too many of their residents do not possess the skills they need to succeed at the higher levels of their tertiary education system.”

• Inside Higher Ed brings us the saga of developmental math at California State University at Bakersfield. Because of budget cuts in 2009, CSU Bakersfield moved from classroom-based developmental math to only offering these courses online. Things didn’t work out like they’d hoped. “In one course, the student pass rate plummeted from 74 percent to 45 percent. In the other, the rate fell from 61 percent to 37 percent.” While the beginning of this story has all the makings of a tragic tale of students being left behind in this era of extreme resource constraints, the university has since managed to bring student pass rates to higher levels than before the cuts. You’ll have to read the whole story to find out how.