Developmental Education

575 Words2 Pages

Community Colleges require students to undergo placement testing prior to beginning any credit base courses. Placement test are conducted as a means of providing a benchmark to measure the academic level of students. As a result of placement testing, community colleges have a large amount of students who are placed in developmental courses. As stated by Bailey, Jaggers, and Jenkins (2015), “approximately two-thirds of incoming community college students fail to meet their institution’s standards for college readiness (p. 119). Developmental courses have been beneficial for students by offering academic development in various courses. The purpose of this paper is to explore the issue of delivery methods for developmental education and identify …show more content…

In Unlocking the gate: What we know about improving developmental education by Rutschow and Schneider, the authors discuss several models for accelerating students’ progress through developmental education. Fast track courses, modularized courses, and mainstreaming students directly into college-level courses are all modules that have been introduce to assist developmental education. These modules have been successful in some cases, however there are also some flaws associated with them. As stated by Rutschow and Schneider (2011) “these approaches show trends of relatively strong increases in students’ achievement, but only mainstreaming has been tested with a relatively rigorous research design” (p. 33). Various states across the nation are creating plans to overhaul the traditional method of developmental courses in order to ensure student success. The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recently tackled the challenge that many of their students are unprepared for higher education. They have developed initiatives to begin the process. One of the initiatives created is the Developmental Education Demonstration Project which focuses on some of the following projects, vigorous advising and monitoring systems, integrated course options (Texas Higher Education Coordinating

Open Document