This blog focuses on my scholarship in my five research projects: learning assistance and equity programs, student peer study group programs, learning technologies, Universal Design for Learning, and history simulations. And occasional observations about life.
Gates Foundations Commits $110M to Reform Traditional Remedial and Developmental Education
(Gates Foundation Press Release) To aid community colleges in developmental education reform, the foundation announced a commitment of up to $110 million to help research and scale innovative programs. These strategies will help under-prepared students spend less time and money catching up, and will lead to improved retention and completion. About half of the foundation’s commitment has already been given to colleges and programs. The remaining $57 million will be given as grants over the next two years and will be guided by lessons learned through the earlier investments, which are showing that good remedial education contains several key elements:
- It starts early with effective collaboration between middle schools, high schools and colleges that can prevent the need for remediation in the first place. For example, El Paso Community College partners with local school districts and the University of Texas at El Paso, which has dramatically improved graduation rates in just a few short years.
- It is tightly structured blending credit-bearing classes with enhanced academic supports. For example, Washington state’s I-BEST program blends basic academics and career training into a seamless accelerated program.
- It’s flexible and personalized to address specific skill gaps to ensure that students learn what they need. This can be accomplished through technology and other means to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of remedial education. Monterey Institute for Technology and Education, for example, will fund the development of remedial math courses that will be made available for free to colleges. The project aims to reduce the time and cost of remediation through interactive and adaptive multimedia and games.
Reoccurring Themes for Historically-Underrepresented Students
- Institutions often admit students from diverse socioeconomic and cultural backgrounds but do not effectively deal with that reality. Most institutions do not report their academic success with the media.
- Many do not place sufficient resources in place to effectively deal with the oppressive and academically-deprived backgrounds of the students. Many institutions target academic resources for upper division students who have survived.
- College admission standards favor the dominant power culture. Standardized admission tests are culturally biased in a variety of ways to favor of the dominant culture. This has erected severe barriers for access of students to many institutions of choice.
- No significant attention is placed on widespread reporting of college outcomes. The dropout rate from college has remained at 50 percent for the past 100 years. There is no significant tie between institutional funding by the state and its rate of academic success.
- Educational leaders and faculty members have always complained about the academic preparation level of prospective students. Academic expectancy always rises mores quickly than the academic preparation level of students. The creation of admission standards guarantees that some students will be excluded and some will be admitted provisionally and need developmental education. The quickly growing database of knowledge in the academic disciplines doubles every five to fifteen years, yet the number of lecture periods to deliver the information has remained fixed for hundreds of years. Since employers expect more of college graduates, increased pressure is placed on college faculty to prepare students at higher levels of knowledge and skill mastery.
- While learning assistance activities and approaches permeate the history of higher education in the U.S., it is nearly universally ignored by education historians. There is little mention of learning assistance, students in general, or faculty members in histories.
- While the name for learning assistance may change over time, the need persists. Some institutions deal with the need by renaming courses. Harvard University renamed it “Remedial Reading” course to “The Reading Course.” Later they renamed “Basic Writing” to “Introduction to Expository Writing.” Enrollment soared. Other institutions simply renumber their courses to a higher level to make them more politically acceptable to campus or state officials.
- Students with learning assistance needs are recruited for economic gain by institutions during times of low student enrollment.
- Rising high school exit standards do not eliminate the need for learning assistance. The College Board was created in 1890 for such a purpose. The 1970's were dominated by A Nation At Risk Report. Two reasons explain why this has occurred. The first is that expectation levels by the college faculty have risen more quickly. The second is the number of students who enter or reenter college after a decade and have forgotten some of what they learned in high school. The third is that more students enter college from high school (nearly two-thirds) than those who enrolled in college preparation course in high school (approximately half). And of those students who enrolled in college prep courses, what proportion earned high marks?
- Academic enrichment activities, based upon best practices of learning assistance, have been offered at privilideged schools for hundreds of years. These institutions have used other language to describe their activities and have a campus value system and culture than support and nurture this orientation.
Past Efforts to Validate Best Practices by USDOE
A precedent for national validation of best education proactices for postsecondary education existed for several decades in the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Research and Improvement (OERI) now succeeded by the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Within OERI was the Program Effectiveness Panel (PEP). PEP reviewed educational practices submitted by educators. An example of one of these applications is provided through the following: https://www.casas.org/home/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.downloadFile&mapID=1362
Through a rigorous evaluation process some practices were "validated." These validated practices were disseminated to the education community. OERI's National Diffusion Network (NDN) provided grants to a selected number of PEP certified programs for national dissemination. Due to budget cuts, both PEP and NDN were eliminated in the 1990s.
Web links added for 2010-04-14
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Achieving the Dream is a multiyear national initiative to help more community college students succeed. The initiative is particularly concerned about student groups that traditionally have faced significant barriers to success, including students of color and low-income students.
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The Developmental Education Initiative is a three-year effort begun in 2009 to identify and develop programs that increase the number of community college students who complete preparatory classes and successfully move on to college-level studies. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, it includes 15 colleges and six states that were early participants in the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative. This password-protected Web site is an essential part of creating a learning community where participating colleges and states can share questions, answers, discoveries, and challenges.
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The Developmental Education Initiative, a three-year project funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education, recently unveiled the state policy framework and strategies that its six participating state partners plan to implement so that they can dramatically increase the number of students who complete college preparatory work and move on to complete college-level work. The six states – Connecticut, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Virginia – were selected for this project because of their prior commitment to community college reform; institutions from these states were first-round participants in Achieving the Dream, a multi-year and -state initiative to increase the success of two-year college students.
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This collection of online journals focus on teaching and learning at the postsecondary level. They include general interest as well as devoted to specific academic disciplines.
Foundation for Best Practices in Postsecondary Education
Commonly accepted principles for improved learning of college students serve as guides for identifying best practices. Chickering and Gamson (1987) identify seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education: (a) encourage frequent student-faculty contact in and out of class, (b) facilitate cooperation among students since learning is a social process, (c) promote active learning through social interaction and engagement with the content material, (d) give prompt feedback to students to allow them to reflect and make changes in behavior, (e) increase time on task to increase higher outcomes, (f) communicate high expectations to prompt extra effort by learners, and (g) respect diverse talents and ways of learning.
Blimling and Whitt (1999) extend several of these best practices outside of the classroom by identifying seven principles of good practice in student affairs: (a) engage in active learning, (b) develop coherent values and ethical standards, (c) set and communicates high learning expectations, (d) use systematic inquiry to improve performance, (e) use resources effectively to achieve institutional mission and goals, (f) forge educational partnerships among stakeholders, and (g) build supportive and inclusive communities.
- Blimling, G. S., & Whitt, E. J. (1999). Good practice in student affairs. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
- Chickering, A. W., & Gamson, Z. F. (1987). Seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education. Washington, D.C.: American Association of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://learningcommons.evergreen.edu/pdf/fall1987.pdf.
Employing an Effective Change Model to Implement Best Practices
College administrators have a wide variety of responsibilities that are demanding: budget manager, strategic planner, student learning leader, personnel manager, and catalyst for change. Change is often difficult not because of lack of interest by others, but rather because of the energy and resources needed for change itself. Every day new management books are being published with a subset focused on higher education management. A key issue for a successful leader is not only leading others to a desired outcome, but also understanding the complicated stages of change that must occur before arriving at that destination. Implementing best practices at an institution requires careful attention and support throughout the innovation cycle.
A classic model for organizational and personal change is provided by Kurt Lewin. Click on this link for another guide on his change model. Professor Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) was one of early leaders in social psychology and focused his research heavily on organizational dynamics. Lewin’s Force Field Analysis (1947, 1951) provides a model for understanding the forces that either foster or hinder change. He described a multi-stage process.
The first stage requires the early leaders of the innovation to help engender dissatisfaction with the present system. Lewin argued that people would not even consider change unless the status quo was demonstrated to be seriously lacking. Applying this principle to higher education, this activity might include reports about the number of students with disabilities enrolled on campus, drop-out rates for students, student satisfaction survey data, and so on.
The second stage occurs when people “unfreeze” from customary behaviors and implement new ones. Activities at this stage might include a few people at the institution experimenting with several practices as a pilot-test. Data are is collected from this pilot test, such as student survey data, changes in grade performance, and increase in utilization by students.
The next stage builds upon the pilot stage by the campus change agents, in this case senior student affairs administrators, presenting a comprehensive model for implementing the best practices. This stage requires not only advocacy from the administrators for change, but sustained attention and resources such as training.
The final stage, according to Lewin, is the most important and also the most challenging. “Refreezing” occurs when people have deeply adopted the new behavior and feel as comfortable with it as they were with the previous behaviors before the change model began. It requires continued support and rewards for people to continue the new behaviors. He argued that this stage is the one where well intentioned pilot programs sometimes are not continued. Applying this principle to postsecondary education, practices would include supplemental pay for additional work outside of the normal job scope or work-week, recognition of performing the new practices through the annual performance review system, and so on, etc. The new practices must not only be advocated, but ‘valued’ in a practical way from the perspective of the front- line implementers of the practice.
This comprehensive model of change requires not just advocating for adoption of the new practices. The entire cycle of change, especially the final stage of supporting ongoing implementation, is essential for systemic and sustained change. The four stages are arranged in a circle since change within an organization or for an individual is continuous. After reaching stage four of the process, the organization or individual needs to carefully reflect on their current performance indicators, engender dissatisfaction with the status quo, and engage in another round of quality improvement.
Following is a YouTube clip that illustrates some of the principles of Lewin's change process with the U.S. automobile companies and the consumer market.
$100 Billion Invested and Only One USDOE Validated Practice
I was curious how much money had been invested in TRIO programs by the federal government since the 1960s. I found a table on the Internet, http://tinyurl.com/TRIOfundinghistoryThe total is about $16 billion through FY10 and they still don't have any validated best practices by external evaluation agencies. Add to this all the money that has been spent on GEAR UP, Adult Education, Title III, Title IV, etc. Since some of those programs were created by the original Higher Education Act, the total by all of them together probably exceeds $100 billion. Maybe a lot more. And only one validated postsecondary practice by USDOE (Supplemental Instruction).
Millions of students are served every year by these federal programs. Many students benefit from the services. However, the USDOE does not have a mechanism to identify why they work. Or what particular policies, specific activities, and the like make the differernce for higher outcomes. TRIO, Title III, GEAR UP, and other federal programs are not themselves best practices. An individual college makes a selection from a wide variety of policies and activities to craft their own approach to better serving students. Those individual choices and the way that they are implemented could be "best practices." But currently there is no where to find such best practices that have been validated by USDOE.
USDOE used to have the Program Effectiveness Panel (PEP) that evaluated education practices at the secondary and postsecondary level. Only one program at the postsecondary level was validated regarding improved student achievement and graduation rates. PEP was eliminagted in the mid 1990s due to budget cuts imposed by the administration of President Clinton.
Every year the U.S. Department of Education awards close to $2 billion for grants to colleges to support high student achievement and graduation rates. But there is currently no system for identifying, validating, and disseminating best practices for postsecondary education. Every year colleges are forced to reinvent the wheel regarding education practices to serve those students. This is an enormous waste of the taxpayer's dollars and lower outcomes for students. We need a onestop shop for college administrators to locate validated best practices that they know will work rather than experimenting on their own students to see if something works. If it does not, the students suffer. if it does work, no one else knows about it. This has to stop. If we ever hope to raise the achievement of U.S. college students to be the best in the world, we will have to make ourselves accountable for those federal funds and effectively share best practices with one another.