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Institutions that have made real strides in improving retention and academic success rates for academically underprepared students have focused not only on revisiting their policies around academic placement but also on revamping their developmental education curriculum. Let’s take a close look at two successful—though quite different—models: The Assisted Learning Approach Dispensing with the traditional developmental sequence altogether, Austin Peay State University places its academically underprepared students immediately into the regular first-year courses—but adds two corequisite, non-credit hours of Structured Learning Assistance (SLA) funded by a $75 lab fee. “When a student arrives with ACT scores indicating they are not college-ready, a low math ACT or a low reading/writing score, we enroll them in a credit-bearing course the moment they walk on campus. We don’t hold them back and lock them into the slow death of a pipeline of non-credit developmental courses. Instead, we move them into their first year and assist them in those courses.”Tristan Denley, Austin Peay State University Austin Peay’s “Structured Learning Assistance” (SLA) workshops have been so successful that the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT) included Austin Peay’s linked workshop model as one of their six recommended models for redesigning developmental courses. SLA workshops are provided to […]

Reports over the past several years from the Lumina Foundation, Complete College America, and other policy and research groups have documented the high cost of developmental education, measured not only in dollars spent but in student attrition rates. In fact, “Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education,” a recent joint statement and meta-analysis provided by the Charles A. Dana Center, Complete College America, the Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future, reported that: Half of all undergraduates (and 70% of students enrolled at community colleges) take at least one remedial course. Only about one quarter of community college students who take a remedial course graduate within eight years. On average, less than half of students in remedial reading courses complete the remedial sequence, and only one third of students in remedial math courses complete that remedial sequence. The Cost of Providing Developmental Courses Not only do developmental courses fail badly at their purpose—that of remediating gaps in student learning so that academically underprepared students can register for first-year courses with a higher degree of successfully completing them—developmental courses also drain considerable institutional resources. Given that half of all entering students are placed in at least one developmental course, […]

One of the most insidious, documented effects of the traditional pipeline of developmental courses on an incoming student is the fatigue of taking multiple non-credit courses (or, in some cases, being required to retake a non-credit course repeatedly). Tristan Denley, provost at Austin Peay State University, calls this course sequence the “slow death.” Your goal should be to move developmental students as quickly as possible into credit-bearing courses that count toward their academic degree or certificate. This shortens the time to graduation; it also builds a student’s confidence and their sense of momentum toward their academic goals, increasing the likelihood that they will persist and succeed. As you reconsider the sequence and design of your developmental education programming, also reconsider your approach to placement. Does the standard policy of placing students, on the basis of their high school transcripts, in specific levels of developmental coursework serve the student and your institution well—or are there more nuanced, effective approaches to placement? Fast-Track Placement Valencia College has revisited their placement criteria as a key part of their strategy to accelerate the progress of academically underprepared students. Reviewing standardized test scores for incoming students, Valencia identifies the top 25% of those students who […]

Student suicide has received renewed attention both in the US and Canada, not only because of the increased number of suicides by college students (with research studies indicating that as many as 1.5% of college students may actually attempt suicide, while many others will give suicide serious consideration at some point during their years on campus) but also because of increased legal scrutiny and the legal liabilities incurred by failing to address a risk of student suicide proactively and speedily. In an interview this week, we asked Allan Shackelford to offer his reflections on the issue. As an attorney and consultant, Allan Shackelford has advised institutions of higher education for more than 30 years. He is the co-author (with Anne Lundquist) of The Student Affairs Handbook: Translating Legal Principles into Effective Policies, as well as Responding to and Supporting Students with Disabilities: Risk Management Considerations. You can find his recommendations below. Legal Ambiguities: Forseeability and Liability Citing Robert Bickel and Peter Lake’s study The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University (1999), Shackelford notes that institutions of higher education owe a legal duty to students to protect them in every reasonable manner from forseeable risks: “At the heart of our […]