Panel:
Becoming College Ready: New Evidence of Remedial Education Reform
(Education)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
More than half of entering community college students must take at least one remedial course before proceeding to college-level coursework (Bailey, Jaggars & Jenkins, 2015). Such coursework costs students both time and money, using up valuable financial aid dollars and adding a semester or more to complete a college credential. An extensive body of studies has examined the effects of the traditional remedial courses on student outcomes, which are best mixed, and often negative for under-prepared students (Jaggars & Stacey, 2014).
Why do traditional developmental education courses often fail to help under-prepared students become college-ready? Previous research highlights several factors including inaccurate placement and lengthy remedial course sequences (Jaggars & Bickerstaff, 2018). Most community colleges use standardized test results as the sole measure for student placement, yet the use of such tests can lead to high levels of placement inaccuracy (Scott-Clayton et al., 2014). Of additional concern is the impact placement into remedial education can have on students. Beyond the obvious time and financial costs incurred by students deemed to be unprepared for college-level coursework, lengthy remedial course sequences can also impact the probability of college persistence. Bailey et al. (2010), for example, found that a substantial amount of remedial students chose not to return to college for the next course in the sequence even though they were successful in previous remedial courses attempted.
In light of this evidence, community colleges across the country began to engage in wide-scale adoption of various remedial education reforms intended to improve placement into and access to credit-bearing college-level courses. The four papers in this session will provide new evidence on the effectiveness of such reforms, covering initiatives in diversified settings. The first presentation will assess the accuracy and impact of a multiple measures placement mechanism that incorporates data from students’ high school transcripts in addition to placement test scores. The presentation will summarize final experimental results from a randomized control trial testing this alternative mechanism against colleges’ traditional test-based systems at seven colleges in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. The next two presentations will focus on the co-requisite remediation reform, which allows under-prepared students to take college-level courses during their first term of enrollment with additional just-in-time learning support, in Tennessee and California. The last presentation will examine the effect of one of the most drastic reforms targeting remediation, which allows the majority of incoming students in the Florida College System to enroll directly in college-level courses. This presentation will focus on the heterogeneous effects of eliminating remediation by students’ high school academic preparation.
The strength of this panel is its timely consideration of a wide range of current reforms aimed at improving student college readiness, as well as the diversity of research represented both in terms of reform setting and methodological approach. The included presentations will reveal rigorous, new evidence on how colleges and policymakers can best support under-prepared students so as to improve access and success.
