The Case for Acceleration in Developmental English and Math
Exponential Attrition and the Promise of Acceleration
Katie Hern and Myra Snell recently collaborated to create an article for the RP Group’s statewide newsletter Perspectives. The article argues that high rates of student attrition are structurally guaranteed in long developmental sequences and presents evidence from Chabot and Los Medanos colleges that one-semester, open-access courses are a promising way to increase student completion rates in college-level English and Math. The full article is linked above.
Sustainability Gap Research
Faculty Inquiry Network
“Zoom-Lens Inquiry: Focusing on Students”
Presentation by Katie Hern
Inquiry: The Academic Sustainability Gap
Why do so many developmental English students earn passing grades on individual assessments of their skills (tests on their reading comprehension, essays) and then withdraw or fail the class?
Sources of Information Used to Build an Answer:
- Gradebook: What patterns do I see in student performance on test/papers/other assessments?
- End-of-term essays in which students reflect on their learning: For students who fell into the “sustainability gap,” what themes do I see in their descriptions of their own learning and experiences in the class? How do these themes relate to the patterns I saw in their grades? And to my observations of their behavior over the semester? This questions eventually evolved into the creation of case studies of representative students.
- Success rates & demographic data from Institutional Research (IR): How did my class compare to other sections of the course that semester?
- Engagement rates: How did my students’ responses on an engagement survey administered by IR compare to the average for other classes at Chabot?
- Student Co-Investigators: Shared a table summarizing the gradebook data of “sustainability gap” students with students in a subsequent semester and asked them to help me interpret it. What did they think was going on with these students? Why were so many capable students not passing? Videotaped their responses and analyzed them for themes. Combined with the case studies, these themes helped me create an overall framework about why students fall into the sustainability gap.
- All the way through the process, I was also having conversations with individual students and my fellow teachers about reasons behind this trend.
- Transcripts: 18 months after the course ended, I analyzed the transcripts of this group of students. What patterns did I see? Was their experience in my class an exception or the rule? Did they go on to pass an English class after not passing mine? What was their GPA? How many units had they successfully completed? How had their stories continued to unfold?
Please visit Katie Hern’s webite on the Sustainability Gap
Learning Community Impact Study
The following links provide an example of integrating different kinds of institutional data into an Inquiry into student learning. The Inquiry focused on understanding the impact a new learning community was having on participating students. It tracks the founding cohort of learning community students over a year and a half, looking at their rates of engagement, learning, success, retention, persistence, and progress in the curriculum, and comparing these to students who enrolled in comparable non-learning community classes at the same time. As part of an equity analysis, the data is also disaggregated by age and ethnicity, showing that the program had a positive impact on the achievement gap African-American and Latino students often experience in the English curriculum.
Springboard_Impact_Study
Springboard_Impact_Summary_(Bar_Graphs)
About FIN
The Faculty Inquiry Network’s (FIN) purpose is to support professional development which includes: conducting faculty inquiry; revisiting basic skills assumptions; interpreting and integrating data; accessing student voices; developing students as co-inquirers; making visible; using technology for teaching and learning; creating and supporting new initiatives, curriculum and program development; constructing educational tools using digital media; and hosting dialogue around student and faculty learning.
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