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.

Is it worth it?

In March, we released More to Most: Scaling Up Effective Community College Practices, a guidebook that lays out a process for identifying promising practices and developing an expansion plan so that good programs reach as many students as possible. Central to the process is the SCALERS framework, developed at Duke University and discussed extensively on this blog. There are other steps that form the foundation for SCALERS application. We’re going to tell you about some of them in our next few posts. To download a copy of More to Most, visit the website: www.more2most.org.

Before you create a plan for scaling up, you need to decide if the program or practice you want to scale is actually effective. The last thing you need is to do more of something that isn’t even worthwhile. (Such logic only applies to things like eating Doritos or watching episodes of Chopped.) Chapter 2 of More to Most, Determining Program Value, lays out a process for assessing the value of a program.

The first stage of this process is defining the problem you are trying to address with your program and identifying your desired outcome. An example of a well-defined problem:

Too many students who test into three developmental education courses never successfully complete a college-level math or English course.

An example of a concrete outcome:

Currently, X percent of students successfully complete gateway math in one year. We will increase this by X percentage points by [YEAR].

You’ve got a program that’s designed to address this problem and help you reach this outcome. During the next stage, you collect evidence that will help you decide how well the program is achieving the desired outcome. What evidence of the program’s impact, both quantitative and qualitative, is available? Possible sources include:

• Basic demographic profile of student body, a target group, and/or program participants
• Course completion data: by course; by student cohort
• Focus group data from students, staff, and/or faculty
• Data from national surveys like CCSSE, SENSE, Noel-Levitz, etc.

Now, you can determine whether the program or practice meets criteria for effectiveness. We focus on two important criteria:

• Does the evidence show that the program delivers the desired outcome?
• Would scaling up the program align with institutional objectives?

It is important to consider both of these questions when determining the value of scaling up the program. Many institutions analyze data disaggregated by race, income, and other demographic factors and identify achievement gaps among student populations. If closing these gaps is an institutional priority for your college and one of the desired outcomes of your program, then make sure you analyze the evidence for how effectively the program accomplishes this goal. When comparing the evidence for several programs, keep in mind that if the program has positive outcomes for a designated population that is generally less successful, it may show a lesser impact on overall student success outcomes, at least in the short term. This does not make the program less valuable, however. The value comes from how well the program matches your desired outcomes and the institution’s priorities — or makes a case for changing those priorities.

Once you’ve collected your evidence, it’s time to make the case for expansion and developing a scaling strategy. We’ll discuss those steps in upcoming posts.

Guest Post: Making Space for Good Decisions

Rob Johnstone made a presentation at the July ATD/DEI State Policy meeting in Florida; we thought Rob’s work with the RP Group, and specifically a project called BRIC (Bridging Research, Information & Culture), would be of interest to the Accelerating Achievement crowd, so we asked him to guest post today. Below, Rob reflects on the importance of carving out time for crucial exploratory conversations—and introduces some tools to help you do the same.

Greetings from sunny California, where I sit in my office at Skyline College just south of San Francisco, with what the hotel industry would term a “partial ocean view.” This means, on the 45 days a year it’s not shrouded in fog, if I squint, I can see a sliver of blue between some trees.

The RP Group is a nonprofit organization that strengthens community colleges’ ability to gather, analyze, and act on information to improve student success. We provide research, evaluation, professional development, and technical assistance services that support evidence-based decision-making and inquiry. Because our work is defined and conducted by community college practitioners, the RP Group provides a unique, on-the ground perspective on complex issues within the California community college system, and, through our work on Completion by Design and the Aspen Prize, across the country.

The unifying thread is a desire to engage all of the groups working on a campus—faculty, staff, administrators, and IR professionals—in developing deep cultures of inquiry that serve as the foundation for improving student outcomes. We define “culture of inquiry” as the institutional capacity to support open, honest, and collaborative dialogue that strengthens the institution and student outcomes. In practice, this means we encourage a variety of people across the campus to ask a wider collection of questions, and then use the evidence gathered to inform campus decision-making. 

As I reflect on these projects, I’m struck both by the similarities in the issues we face and the vast array of structures and approaches colleges have put in place to address these issues. The problems we wrestle with in the community college sector are complex and challenging, and there are no silver bullets (at least none that we’ve found!). The analyses we conduct don’t speak for themselves, and there are no self-evident answers. Given this, the strongest take-away from our work is how critical it is to structurally create the time and space for deep conversations, to explore the available data and evidence, and to extract insight and meaning that forms the foundation for action. These conversations work best when a wide range of participants from different parts of the college are brought to the table to explore the data.

As important as it is, in our work, we’ve found that creating that time and space for critical inquiry and data exploration conversations is challenging. Colleges are already strapped for their most precious resource—time!—and creating yet another committee for this work can be difficult. We’ve seen colleges be more successful when they re-purpose existing venues for these types of discussions, such as department and division meetings; committees devoted to developmental education, college success, first-year experience, or institutional planning; academic senates, and even the President’s cabinet.  

In each of these venues, we’ve found that many participants actually welcome the shift, as these meetings tend to be bureaucratic and process-driven; re-focusing on research, evidence of student success, and outcomes is often energizing and engages the participants’ passion. This also has the benefit of weaving the work into the fiber of the college, rather than encapsulating it in one committee. Clearly, college leadership has to prioritize the importance of such a change in these meetings or committees, but we have seen it work in practice.

For ideas on the kinds of questions to ask and ways to translate the answers into decisions, take a look at some of the resources we’ve put together on our website. I’d start with the BRIC Inquiry Guides or the “Evidenced-based Decision-making” section of our resources page. Colleges have used the discussion questions from the Inquiry Guides in department meetings and other campus committees to start conversations that open the door to future inquiry into practices, structures, and student success data.

In the end, we have to translate the results of our collective inquiry into action. The type of research and inquiry in which we engage is directional. At some point, in the words of Elphaba from the musical Wicked, we have to “trust our instincts, close our eyes, and leap.” In our world, “instinct” refers to the collective and deep subject-matter expertise that we have amassed at the colleges, married with a deep process of inquiry into the data and evidence. In taking the leap, we add to our collective knowledge-base—and quite often, we learn more when our initiatives relatively fail than when they succeed.

Please feel free to contact me directly at rjohnstone@rpgroup.org with any comments or questions.

Rob Johnstone is senior research fellow, Research & Planning Group for California Community Colleges and dean of research and planning, Skyline College

Guest Post: Applying Promising K-12 Models

In December 2010, the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME) hosted a Big Ideas Fest, an “inspirational extravaganza” where participants shared “ideas and real world results that prove when you put the learner in the center of all systems, anything is possible.” Big ideas, indeed! Thanks to support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, three DEI colleges were able to send representatives. Dr. Kathleen Cleary, from Sinclair Community College attended the event; she was particularly struck by a presentation from the New York City Public Schools’ School of One program. Today’s post is an introduction to the School of One approach from Mickey Muldoon, School of One’s manager of external affairs. Tomorrow, we’ll feature a post from Dr. Cleary, exploring how such an approach might be applied in developmental education at the community college level.

School of One was inspired by the simple insight that students in New York City classrooms – and across the country – have incredibly variable skills, knowledge, abilities, and challenges. Treating all the students in any classroom as identical cogs doesn’t do justice to their differences – and can be inefficient and taxing on teachers. So just like Amazon.com and Pandora.com respond to the unique preferences of their users, we are building a classroom that adapts to every student, with the help of sophisticated technology behind the scenes.

Below are some of the key principles of our philosophy and design:

• Multiple modalities enable personalization. Our classrooms are large (~2,000 square feet) and divided into learning stations in different modalities: large and small group instruction, small group collaboration, software-based instruction, live remote tutoring, and independent practice. Because students are distributed across the stations at any given time, the fast students can work on advanced material, and slower students are not left behind in the back of class. Moreover, students who struggle in traditional classrooms often thrive in small groups, one-on-one, or with software or online tutors.
• Data-driven scheduling. All School of One students take a short, custom online quiz at the end of each math period. Then at the end of each day, School of One’s learning algorithm processes all the quiz results and generates a unique plan for every student for the following day. Students who pass their quizzes are automatically moved on to new material; students who don’t will continue on the same material on the following day, often with extra help from the teaching staff.
• Classroom tools should empower teachers to do what they do best. Our technology and data systems streamline administrative tasks, assessments, grading, and data analysis. This means that School of One teachers can easily access the key information they need, and spend more time planning and delivering great instruction and working directly with students.
• Constant performance evaluation. In addition to daily online quizzes, School of One students participate in mandatory and voluntary evaluation and testing. So far, the results are promising: in the most recent in-school and after-school pilots, School of One students significantly outperformed their peers. For more information, go here.

To learn more about School of One, please visit www.schoolofone.org.

Thanks to DEI and Accelerating Achievement for the opportunity to share our work.


Mickey Muldoon is School of One’s manager of external affairs.