As the demand for educated workers continues to grow, over half of the nation’s college students, and the overwhelming majority of disadvantaged students, have turned to community colleges in an effort to secure improved social-economic opportunities. However, policymakers across the country face significant challenges as a substantial proportion of students arrive with skill levels in math and English that fall below college-readiness standards. This group of underprepared students is assigned to take developmental coursework, but the majority never completes these courses. What is more, causal examinations of whether developmental education actually improves student outcomes have found its impact to be mixed. Further, studies have shown that the computer-adaptive assessments, which have traditionally been used to place students into developmental courses, are not particularly accurate nor do they perform well in predicting success in those courses. Taken together, these research findings provide crucial evidence in support of reforming the placement and delivery of developmental education.

In an effort to address the complex challenge posed by high numbers of underprepared students, policymakers across the country have begun or are in the process of designing and implementing reforms intended to transform the developmental education course delivery and in some instances the entire assessment and placement systems. The Large State Community College System (LSCCS) we study in this paper was the first to implement substantial reforms at scale to their developmental education programs. Particularly, as part of the reform, the state implemented a customized, diagnostic mathematics assessment to replace the former computer adaptive placement test; it also involved a restructuring of the developmental mathematics curriculum into a series of nine modules. The goals of the reform are to reduce the need for developmental education, reduce the time spent in developmental education, and to increase the number of developmental students who graduate or transfer.

This study provides a rigorous test of the efficacy of this developmental math reform; and it is the first to study a large-scale statewide reform. Given the shift in the type of placement instrument used and the restructured course structures, an application of empirical strategies commonly used (e.g. regression-discontinuity and instrumental variables) is not feasible. This study therefore uses data from eight LSCCS cohorts, consisting of over 135,000 first-time college students, and employs an Interrupted Time-Series (ITS) design to examine the early academic impacts of the reform by exploiting the statewide time of implementation. Furthermore, subgroup analyses are used to isolate the impact of the new placement policy, the restructured courses, and of both combined. Overall, results indicate positive short-run impacts of the reform: more test-takers placed out of developmental math and students were more likely to take and pass college-level mathematics. Credit accrual findings confirm that test-takers were also accumulating fewer developmental credits and slightly more college credits. Policy implications related to shifts in enrollment and college revenue, as well as the potential need for changes to the curriculum, pedagogy and student supports are discussed as they have important implications for ways to improve outcomes of underprepared students.