Matthew Zeidenberg

Do Student Success Courses Actually Help Community College Students Succeed

Many first-time college students arrive on campus unprepared to succeed in college. This is especially the case at community colleges, which pursue an “open door” mission of serving all students, regardless of prior educational background. According to a survey of degree-granting institutions by the National Center for Education Statistics (2003), 42 percent of entering first-time students at public two-year colleges in fall 2000 took at least one remedial course (or one “developmental” course; we use these terms interchangeably), compared to 20 percent of entering students at public four-year institutions. Among recent high school graduates who entered higher education through community colleges in the mid-1990s, over 60 percent took at least one remedial course (authors’ calculations based on the National Education Longitudinal Survey of 1988 [NELS: 88]). Underpreparation is typically viewed in terms of deficiencies in students’ basic academic skills, specifically in those skills integral to the reading, writing, and mathematics subject areas. Community college educators maintain, however, that many entering students are also unprepared in other important ways. It is widely believed that many students have poor study habits and lack clear goals for college and careers. Some experts contend that helping students address these non-academic deficiencies is just as important as helping them acquire basic academic skills through remedial classes, which typically do not address issues such as study skills, goal setting, and the like (Boylan, 2002; Pascarella & Terenzini, 1991). In response to this increasingly acknowledged need, community colleges now offer “student success” courses that teach students how to write notes, take tests, and manage their time; that help students explore their learning styles; and that encourage students to develop plans for college and careers (Derby & Smith, 2004). A wide spectrum of students may find these courses useful. Although such courses are not themselves considered to be remedial, sometimes colleges require that they be taken by students who need academic remediation. Student success courses have certainly become wellestablished. Indeed, several publishers offer textbooks for these courses, in some cases allowing colleges to customize the course material with institution-specific information such as support services available on a given campus. Student success courses, and their effectiveness, are the focus of this Brief. Despite the prevalence of these courses at community colleges, little research has been conducted on their effectiveness. Recently a research team headed by Dr. Patricia Windham at the Florida Department of Education compared the outcomes of students who completed a student success course — which in Florida is known as a “student life skills,” or “SLS,” course — with those of students who did not take or complete such a course (Florida Department of Education, 2006). They found that SLS course completers were more likely than non-completers to achieve one of the following three indicators of success: earning a community college credential, transferring to the state university system, or remaining enrolled in college after five years. Results of this study are shown in Figure 1. Among students who needed at least one remedial course, those who passed an SLS course were more likely to achieve these milestones than were those who did not take or complete an SLS course. The same pattern holds for students who were required to take remedial courses in all three subject areas — students who are generally plagued by high rates of failure. In Florida’s 28 community colleges, SLS courses are open to all students, but some of the colleges require that certain students take them. According to an earlier study (Florida Department of Education, 2005), 13 colleges have no requirement that any particular students take an SLS course; it is, rather, an elective course. Most of the other colleges tie a requirement to enroll in SLS to enrollment in developmental courses, although the rule varies in terms of which, and how many, developmental courses students need to enroll in before they are required to take SLS. One college requires all students NUMBER 36 JUNE 2007 ISSN 1526-2049

Building Bridges to Postsecondary Training for Low-Skill Adults: Outcomes of Washington State's I-BEST Program

Each year, community colleges, schools, and community organizations offer basic skills instruction to more than 2.5 million adults with limited skills and education. Such programs include Adult Basic Education (ABE) and GED preparation programs for individuals who do not have a high school credential and English-as-a-SecondLanguage (ESL) programs for persons with limited proficiency in English. Yet few of these students advance successfully to college-level education and training, even when they attend a basic skills program offered by a community college. Not doing so limits the potential of these individuals to secure jobs that pay family-supporting wages and that offer opportunities for career advancement. Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training, or I-BEST, is an innovative program created to address this problem. First piloted in 2004-05, I-BEST was developed by the community and technical colleges in Washington State to increase the rate at which adult basic skills students enter and succeed in postsecondary occupational education and training. Under the I-BEST model, basic skills instructors and career-technical faculty jointly design and teach collegelevel occupational, or what in Washington State are called “workforce,” courses for adult basic skills students. Instruction in basic skills is thereby integrated with instruction in college-level career-technical skills. This model challenges the conventional notion that basic skills instruction should be completed by students prior to starting college-level courses. The approach thus offers the potential to accelerate the transition of adult basic skills students into college programs. This Brief, which summarizes a longer paper, presents findings from a CCRC study that investigated the outcomes of students who participated in the program. The study compared, over a two-year tracking period, the educational outcomes of I-BEST students with those of other basic skills students, including students who comprised a particularly apt comparison group — those non-I-BEST basic skills students who nonetheless enrolled in at least one workforce course in academic year 2006-07, the period of enrollment examined in the study. The analyses controlled for observed differences in background characteristics and enrollment patterns of students in the sample. We examined data on more than 31,000 basic skills students in Washington State, including nearly 900 I-BEST participants.

How I-BEST Works: Findings from a Field Study of Washington State's Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training Program.

Acknowledgments Funding for this research was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The authors wish to thank the administrators, staff, and faculty interviewed at Washingtons community and technical colleges for their time and insights. They also wish to thank the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges for supporting this research and reviewing earlier drafts of the report, Wendy Schwartz for her expert editing and formatting of the manuscript, and Doug Slater for managing the publication process. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the authors. John Wachen is a senior research assistant at CCRC. He is involved in research on developmental education summer bridge programs, community college performance funding policies, developmental education assessment and placement practices, and the Achieving the Dream initiative. He holds a B.S. from Pennsylvania State University and an M.A. from the University of Maryland. focus of his work is finding ways to strengthen the capacity of community colleges and other public postsecondary institutions to educate economically and educationally disadvantaged individuals for gainful employment in a knowledge economy. He holds a doctorate in public policy analysis from Carnegie Mellon University. Michelle Van Noy is a research associate at CCRC. She conducts research on the workforce development role of community colleges. She holds an M.S. in public policy from Rutgers University. She is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology and education at Columbia University. at MPR. is the leading independent authority on the nations 1,200 two-year colleges. CCRCs mission is to conduct research on the major issues affecting community colleges in the United States and to contribute to the development of practice and policy that expands access to higher education and promotes success for all students. Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) is an innovative program and strategy developed by the Washington (WA) State Board for Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) in conjunction with the states 29 community colleges and five technical colleges. Its goal is to increase the rate at which adult basic education and English-as-a-second-language students advance to college-level occupational programs and complete postsecondary credentials in fields offering good wages and career advancement. The promising results from preliminary analyses of I-BEST have generated interest in replication of the I-BEST model. Nationally, over 2.5 million students take adult basic skills courses at community colleges, high schools, and community organizations; only a fraction of these go on to pursue and earn college credentials. …

The impact of risk-averse operation on the likelihood of extreme events in a simple model of infrastructure

A simple dynamic model of agent operation of an infrastructure system is presented. This system evolves over a long time scale by a daily increase in consumer demand that raises the overall load on the system and an engineering response to failures that involves upgrading of the components. The system is controlled by adjusting the upgrading rate of the components and the replacement time of the components. Two agents operate the system. Their behavior is characterized by their risk-averse and risk-taking attitudes while operating the system, their response to large events, and the effect of learning time on adapting to new conditions. A risk-averse operation causes a reduction in the frequency of failures and in the number of failures per unit time. However, risk aversion brings an increase in the probability of extreme events.

The Content of Their Coursework: Understanding Course-Taking Patterns at Community Colleges by Clustering Student Transcripts

Community college students typically have access to a large selection of courses and programs, and therefore the student transcripts at any one college or college system tend to be very diverse. As a result, it is difficult for faculty, administrators, and researchers to understand the course-taking patterns of students in order to determine what programs of study they appear to be pursuing. Attempting to examine these patterns and then comparing them with listed program requirements would be a very timeconsuming activity. The most common way of assigning a program of study to a student—picking the subject in which she has taken the most courses—is overly simple, because many programs require courses across several subjects. However, because students who have similar patterns of course-taking in terms of subjects and particular courses taken are likely to be in similar programs, clustering can be a useful way to make sense of the relevant data. Clustering allows researchers to group similar items into clusters, relying only on a measure of the similarity of those items. In this paper, we apply a clustering algorithm to the problem of understanding college transcripts, which serve as the items to be clustered. To our knowledge, this is the first effort to organize transcripts based on their course content using clustering. We base the measure of similarity on the proportion of curricular subjects that each transcript has in common with every other one. Our data are community and technical college transcripts for a cohort of students who first entered the Washington State system during the fall of the 2005–06 academic year and who had no prior postsecondary experience. We used our clustering algorithm to separately cluster liberal arts and career-technical students. We found that the algorithm did a good job of separately clustering each of these groups. The clusters roughly corresponded to programs of study, so we were able to estimate how many students were undertaking each program and what subjects students were studying within each cluster. We were also able to examine the demographics and the completion and transfer rates of the students within each cluster, in order to get an idea of what types of students were in each program of study and how successful they seemed to be in college. We found substantial variation on these dimensions as well as on the extent to which students’ programs were either concentrated in a single subject or spread across several subjects. Clustering is a powerful way to understand the course-taking patterns of students and assign programs of study. It makes few prior assumptions about the data; rather, it allows the data to organize itself based on a similarity measure. It relieves the analyst of determining what the program categories should be. It has the ability to detect patterns of activity across subjects within student transcripts. Note that although we have applied this method to community college students, it is applicable at all levels of postsecondary education. We conclude that this method would be useful to researchers throughout education who are trying to understand student course-taking patterns and programs of study, and who need to organize large amounts of transcript data.

Human Resource Development and Career and Technical Education in American Community Colleges

With their open access admission policies, low tuition costs, and convenient locations, community colleges are designed to make college accessible to all. They strive to meet three main goals. The first is to teach marketable vocational skills, the second is to provide the first two years of a four-year bachelor’s degree program, and the third is to provide continuing education and enrichment for community residents. This paper covers issues that are relevant to the community college mission of helping prepare a skilled workforce for jobs offering reasonable wages. After providing an overview about community colleges and their students, the paper discusses the types of remedial education programs that are most likely to provide the large number of underprepared students enrolled in community colleges with the skills to advance to college-level courses. It considers the growing phenomenon of dual enrollment that enables students to earn both high school and college credit for courses while still in high school. It addresses the ways that community colleges can support local labor markets and regional economic development and their efforts to build career pathways for workers. It describes the growing role of community colleges in online education, and it reviews the financing of community colleges. The paper also discusses issues related to community college persistence and completion, and it cites evidence of the market value of the education and credentials the colleges provide. Finally, it considers the usefulness of the American community college as a model for other countries seeking to develop institutions that serve similar functions. Address correspondence to: Thomas Bailey, Director Community College Research Center Teachers College, Columbia University 525 West 120 Street, Box 174 New York, NY 10027 Tel.: 212-678-3091 Email: tbailey@tc.edu Visit CCRC’s website at: http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu

Not Just Math and English: Courses That Pose Obstacles to Community College Completion

Discussions of the barriers to completion in community colleges have largely focused on student success in introductory college-level math and English courses, and rightfully so, since these courses are typically required for degrees. However, there is a much broader range of courses that also serve as “gatekeepers” in the sense that they are obstacles to completion. This paper offers methods for identifying these courses and for assessing the relative extent of the obstacle to completion each of them poses. We compare the performance in these courses of students who successfully completed a credential with those who did not. We find that the difficulty students experience in succeeding in many other introductory courses is just as great as that posed by college math and English. If colleges want to reduce impediments to graduation, they therefore need to look at a broader range of courses than just math and English and devise strategies for improving student achievement in these courses as well. We also find that overall GPA in college courses is a stronger predictor of completion than performance in any one course. This suggests that colleges need to monitor students’ overall performance to identify those who are in danger of not completing and design academic and non-academic interventions to help them succeed. Conversely, colleges need also to identify students who did well in these obstacle courses but have dropped out, so that they can encourage them to continue. It also suggests that remedial instruction, which is typically focused on math and English, should be rethought and its scope broadened.

Dynamics of an Economics Model for Generation Coupled to the OPA Power Transmission Model

In this paper we explore the interaction between a dynamic model of the power transmission system (OPA) and a simple economic model of power generation development. Despite the simplicity of this economic model, complex dynamics both in the economics (prices, market share etc) and in the transmission system characteristics (blackouts, reliability etc) are found. Depending on the values of the control parameters (the price enhancement factor, the critical margin and the Minimal Acceptable Rate of Return) the system can be in various states with vastly differing properties. These states are characterized by power law tails in the failure sizes in one limit and exponential tails with extremely high frequency of failures in the other limit. At least some of these control parameters can be thought of as regulatory based and could therefore be directly influenced by reliability considerations.

A Simple Model for the Reliability of an Infrastructure System Controlled by Agents

A simple dynamic model of agent operation of an infrastructure system is presented. This system evolves over a long time scale by a daily increase in consumer demand that raises the overall load on the system and an engineering response to failures that involves upgrading of the components. The system is controlled by adjusting the upgrading rate of the components and the replacement time of the components. Two agents operate the system. Their behavior is characterized by their risk-averse and risk-taking attitudes while operating the system, their response to large events, and the effect of learning time on adapting to new conditions. A risk-averse operation causes a reduction in the frequency of failures and in the number of failures per unit time. However, risk aversion brings an increase in the probability of extreme events.