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Developmental Sequences in Community Colleges

Developmental education is designed to provide students with weak academic skills the opportunity to strengthen those skills enough to prepare them for college-level coursework. The concept is simple enough—students who arrive unprepared for college are provided instruction to bring them up to an adequate level. But in practice, developmental education (or “remedial” education, we use these terms interchangeably) is complex and confusing. Experts do not agree on the meaning of being “college ready,” and policies governing assessment, placement, pedagogy, staffing, completion, and eligibility for enrollment in college-level, credit-bearing courses vary from state to state, college to college, and program to program. The developmental education process is confusing enough simply to describe, yet from the point of view of the student, especially one with very weak academic skills and little previous success in school, it may appear as a bewildering set of unanticipated obstacles involving several assessments, classes in more than one subject area, and sequences of courses requiring three or more semesters of study before the student (often a high school graduate) is judged prepared for college-level work. The policy deliberation and especially the research about developmental education give scant attention to this confusion and complexity. Discussion typically assumes that the state of being “college ready” is well-defined, and it often elides the distinction between students who need remediation and those who actually enroll in developmental courses. What is more, developmental education is often discussed without acknowledgement of the extensive diversity of services that bear that label. Any comprehensive understanding of developmental education and any successful strategy to improve its effectiveness cannot be built on such a simplistic view. In this Brief, which summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center on patterns of student progression through developmental education, we broaden the discussion by moving beyond consideration of the developmental course and focus attention instead on the developmental sequence. In most colleges, students are, upon initial enrollment, assigned to different levels of developmental education on the basis of performance on placement tests. Students with greater academic deficiencies are often referred to a sequence of three or more courses designed to prepare them in a stepby-step fashion for the first college-level course in a particular subject area. For example, students with the greatest need in developmental math may be expected to enroll in and pass pre-collegiate math or arithmetic, basic algebra, and intermediate algebra in order to prepare them for college-level algebra. We define the “sequence” as a process that begins with initial assessment and referral to remediation and ends with completion of the highestlevel developmental course—the course that in principle completes the student’s preparation for college-level studies. At times we extend the notion of “sequence” into the first-level college course in the relevant subject area—known as the “gatekeeper” course—since in the end the short-term purpose of remediation is to prepare the student to be successful in that first college-level course. In this study we examine the relationship between referral to developmental education and actual enrollment, and we track students as they progress or fail to progress through their referred sequences of remedial courses, analyzing the points at which they exit those sequences. We also analyze demographic and institutional characteristics that may be related to student progression in developmental sequences. We carry out this analysis using longitudinal data collected as part of the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative (see www.achievingthedream.org). The sample includes data on more than 250,000 students from 57 colleges in seven states. This Achieving the Dream sample more closely represents an urban, low-income, and minority student population than do community colleges in the country as a whole. Because the sample is not representative of all community college students, we checked our results—when possible—