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.
New Web Bookmarks for 2010-04-16
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Create, deliver and monetize online courses with Odijoo
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Some students are deciding not to complete a college degree since the credential is not needed (nor the tuition debt) to obtain the job they want. Students are seeking other places to develop the skills they need for work.
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I’m Rey Junco, a college professor and researcher who studies how social media use affects college students. I’m particularly interested in using quantitative methods to assess the effects of social media on student development, engagement, and success. Social Media in Higher Education is a place where I’ll blog about the research I’m conducting and provide commentary on using technology in educationally-relevant ways.
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Recent research has shown that social media use is correlated with indices of student engagement. While a relationship exists, no research has been conducted to elucidate the causal connection, if any, between engagement in social media spaces and engagement in the real world. This talk will outline an experimental study, currently underway, that assesses whether first-year college students’ use of Twitter affects student engagement and success.
Reoccurring Themes for Historically-Underrepresented Students
A review of the history of academic access and learning assistance in American higher education validates the following reoccurring themes. Understanding these can help predict future trends and proactive actions to take.
- 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.
New web links for 2010-04-13
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Can create simple audio podcasts. This utility is part of a larger suite of audio and visual tools mentioned earlier under posting for http://aviary.com online software.