AATYC and Student Success September 30, 2010

AATYC and Student Success Higher ed imperative used to be about access; now it’s about student success. Two-year colleges recognize the challenge, and have been proactively undertaking initiatives: Career Pathways, Achieving the Dream, Center for Community College Student Engagement (CCCSE), Foundations of Excellence.

Data Driven Decision Making Part-time and Full-time students. Achieving the Dream. WA and MD momentum point studies.

AATYC Center for Student Success Intended to build upon and better coordinate this collection work: disseminate and scale what is working, and further experiment with new strategies. 3 Year Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation Grant. Additional investment by Southern Bancorp.

Center’s Primary Objectives Promote activities and raise funding to: Build upon and take to scale best practices for student success currently underway. Pilot new practices, particularly in critical areas such as developmental education. Develop and promote supportive policy change.

Gathering Information on Best Practices Established faculty/administrator Advisory Committee to help identify what works and guide Center. Visited colleges in state and out (visited three of OH’s Developmental Education Initiative colleges and met with state policy team). Worked with UCA Mashburn Center to help identify best practices (report forthcoming).

Information Gathering cont…. Attended strategic conferences – Gates Foundation I-BEST convening – Achieving the Dream/DEI policy meeting – National Center for Postsecondary Research conference at Columbia University titled Developmental Education: What Policies and Practices Work for Students. Reviewed Community College Research Center work and other research.

What Have We Learned? Foremost: No Silver Bullet! Certain practices are showing promise: student orientation, college success courses, mandatory advising, learning communities, student mentoring. Developmental education is a particularly critical barrier to student success, and more experimentation with innovative approaches is needed.

“Developmental Education is a Moral Imperative” – Kay McClenney UT Austin It will always be critical to access for certain students: – Certain students, particularly underserved students, will always need it, even with improved K-12 learning. – Non-traditional students will always need it; almost 50% of all students in remedial courses are 25 or older. However, it’s equally critical that it be done better.

What Do We Know About Doing it Better? Rigorous research on successful practices is limited. Promising reforms fall into 4 categories: prevention, acceleration, contextualization, supplemental supports. Source: Zachry, Elizabeth, and Emily Schneider Building Foundations for Student Readiness: A Review of Rigorous Research and Promising Trends in Developmental Education. New York: MDRC.

Prevention Interventions that help students avoid remediation: – Early assessment and intervention (e.g. Arkadelphia College Prep Academy). – Summer bridge programs (e.g. Career Coaches Summer ACT Prep program). – Assessment pre-test seminars and practice tests (e.g. Pretesting, Retesting Education Prep Program at El Paso Community College). – Dual enrollment. – ABE partnerships.

Acceleration Interventions that speed up students completion of remedial courses: – Modularization or shorter sequencing of traditional courses (TN, VA, KY). – Fast track (intensive, compressed instruction). – Mainstreaming: Let students near college-ready, start college with some extra support (Community College of Baltimore County).

Contextualization Interventions that integrate basic skills curriculum with vocational or college-content coursework: – Contextualizing basic skills instruction within short-term vocational coursework (I-BEST). – Learning communities (students take dev ed and college course as cohort).

Supplemental Supports Interventions that enhance the supports for remedial students: – Tutoring and supplemental instruction. – Advising. – Student Success Courses.

Bottom Line: More Experimentation and Rigorous Evaluation Needed Developmental Education Redesign Demonstration Project. Test most promising models and other innovative practices in AR, with third party rigorous evaluation. – Also look at alternative assessment, classroom instructional, and professional development practices. – Radical curricular redesign (Statway Initiative).

Dev Ed Redesign Demo Project Workgroup established with dev ed faculty representatives from all colleges. Craft proposal(s) for federal and private foundation funding (Gates Foundation, federal CC initiative). Identify models and practices that work and can be taken to scale, and identify needed supportive institutional and state policy change.

Dev Ed Just Piece of Larger Student Success Puzzle Center is striving for identification and dissemination of larger collection or menu of student success practices that work and that colleges can select from and implement to suit their particular needs.