For the Reading List

It’s a newsy week on Accelerating Achievement. Today, we’re highlighting recent releases from the Community College Research Center. And while we’ve not figured out how to provide a link that downloads directly to your brain, we hope that you’ll be able to find time to read the pieces that are relevant to your work.

• Predicting Success in College: The Importance of Placement Tests and High School Transcripts examines placement test and transcript validity in predicting course grades and college performance. Findings: while the placement tests aren’t very predictive, high school GPA is strongly associated with college GPA. You can read some additional commentary on this work on the JFF blog, in the New York Times, and in the Hartford Courant.  

• Student Success Courses and Educational Outcomes at Virginia Community Colleges looks at the relationship between student success course enrollment and short-term student outcomes. Findings: students enrolled in a success course in the first semester were more likely to earn college-level credit in the first year and more likely to persist to the second year. You might also like to check out these D.R.E.A.M. 2012 presentations on student success courses in Maryland, North Carolina and Texas.

• A National Center for Postsecondary Research paper, Learning Communities for Students in Developmental English: Impact Studies at Merced College and the Community College of Baltimore County, looks at the impact of semester-long learning communities linking developmental English with a variety of other courses. Findings at the two colleges were mixed.

State Policy Update

Our colleagues at Jobs for the Future have been compiling newsletters, writing reports, and posting blogs, all about developmental education, state policy, and every good thing. We wanted to be sure that you had the latest links to all this great material:

• The March 2012 edition of Achieving Success is available here. Achieving Success is the state policy newsletter of Achieving the Dream and the Developmental Education Initiative, with features on all three elements of the DEI state policy framework. In data driven improvement, you'll find a synopsis of a recent convening on faculty engagement; in investment in innovation, there's a conversation with Shanna Smith Jaggers from CCRC discussing state policy implications of her recent work on the opposing forces that shape developmental education (she blogged about it here); and finally, in policy supports, you'll find viewpoints about placement polices from both SMARTER Balanced and PARCC common core assessment consortia.

•  JFF has also has released a new set of tools to help states design performance-based funding systems. You can download Tying Funding to Community College Outcomes: Models, Tools, and Recommendations for States here.

• Rachel Pleasants just completed a three-part series on the JFF blog about scaling up. The three posts, planning for scale, managing change, and ensuring that good programs make a strong impact, draw from a session at the recent ATD/DEI State Policy Meeting.

OH - IO!

Not only is the state representing in the Final Four, they're representing in developmental education reform. Last week in Community College Times, Madeline Patton featured three Ohio DEI colleges and three unique approaches to dev ed innovation. Patton details how Cuyahoga Community College, North Central State College, and Zane State College, working in distinctly different communities, have pursued a common goal of improving outcomes for students who need developmental education. From acceleration to attitude to advocacy, these colleges are seeing great results for their students. Read the whole article to learn more!

Redesigning & Restructuring Math Emporium Facilities: Challenging, But Not Impossible

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, and lobbying. In the post below, Lucy Michal, mathematics professor at El Paso Community College, discusses earnings and resource generation as she shows how EPCC had to tackle the redesign of physical spaces to scale up the college’s math emporiums.

When El Paso Community College’s Developmental Education (DE) Math Standing Committee faculty restructured the DE math course sequence, redesigning curriculum presented familiar challenges, but redesigning facilities presented unfamiliar challenges. To help with this, college administrators sent committee members and deans to visit colleges who had undergone redesign.  After several site visits, committee members did not see any one design that would work for EPCC’s population of students and its multi-campus district. They had a lot of planning and resource building to do before scaling up DE math emporium course offerings.

The Committee’s initial proposal had three options:  joining two classrooms to create mini-emporium areas, identifying a store or warehouse to transform into a math emporium, or using an area in the Administrative Services Center to construct a math emporium for the District.

While college administrators reviewed these options, El Paso’s Developmental Education Initiative went into its first year with funding for identified needed technology—computers and printers—but redesigning facilities presented a greater challenge. One of the campus deans volunteered her campus to be the first to tear down a wall and construct a math emporium. Reconstruction occurred during winter break and in Spring 2010; the first mini-emporium offered DE math emporium courses in an area with 48 computers and one printer. The second emporium facility was made possible when funding for a new science wing included expansion of the math lab, an emporium with 34 computers, a tutoring area, and a seminar room. The third campus identified two classrooms and underwent the same construction used in the first campus to create a mini-emporium with 48 computers. 

The fourth campus in downtown El Paso presented a challenge because of its older buildings. At that time, the college purchased a building to expand the downtown student service offices; however, it was too small. The college president identified a different building for the downtown campus math emporium. The building, an old bakery across the street from the downtown campus, was transformed into a large area for the math emporium, a math lab, a tutoring area, three faculty offices, a math faculty meeting room, and a computer classroom. The old bakery is now an innovative Learning Emporium.

And finally, for its largest campus, the College purchased a portable building and is currently being constructed to house two large emporium rooms with 40 computers in each room, one computer classroom, and an area for tutoring and student study tables. Construction will be completed with enough time to allow for Fall 2012 DE math courses. 

The DE math committee learned more than just how to restructure their courses; they also learned about:

• expanding and reconstructing facilities
• furnishing learning areas
• wiring for new technological classrooms
• rescheduling class sections
• designing learning spaces for students. 

Among the most important of the lessons learned was: always have a plan B in case construction deadlines are not met. With the emporium now in place on the final campus, the college will be offering over 80 percent of its DE math courses in campus-based math mini-emporium areas.

Scaling Up at Grad Nation

We’re at the 2012 Building a Grad Nation Summit, hosted by America’s Promise Alliance. According to board chair Alma Powell, building a grad nation is all about “bringing people together from all sectors of our communities to work in new, more coordinated ways and to inspire action.” You can read about their goals here. While they’ve got immense energy focused on the high school dropout crisis, there have been multiple sessions discussing connections to postsecondary education and careers (though we’re hoping to see a larger community college presence next year!)

In addition to postsecondary connection, there's also been talk about “scaling what works.” Since we’ve just released a guidebook on scaling up effective practices (check it out!), I’m interested in how other organizations are thinking and talking about this topic. (Really, I’m always interested in it—let’s be honest.) A session yesterday included panelists from large national organizations (the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Big Brothers Big Sisters), organizations taking the first steps to start affiliated organizations in a new city (Self Enhancement, Inc.), and smaller organizations beginning the process at the community level (Boston Rising, Zone 126).

One thing that’s been on my mind is the idea of starting small, but thinking big—in other words, how scale fits into early program design. I wanted to hear what these organizations had learned about planning for scale and ensuring that the resources invested in pilots went into something scale-able. Lucky for me, there was a Q&A session. Here’s what I heard:
 

• Limit the number of moving parts. Reducing the complexity of your approach will make it easier to replicate.
•  Articulate a simple, clear theory of change. Identify the inputs necessary to reach the outcome you want. Then determine the supports you’ll need to do just that. 
• Consider cost from the beginning. Pilot design should not just be about the mechanisms for delivering the program—it’s about the entire operation. And that includes resources. 
• Think about who you can partner with to disseminate your strategy and expand your reach. Are there technology options? Are there organizations that already do something that you want to integrate?

I like this idea of keeping it simple—both the theory of change and the program. But I know that it’s difficult to do when you’re addressing complex issues and working in equally complex organizations. Just one more reason to tackle these big questions from the very beginning and do everything you can to set your program up for success.