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Deep Dive
How colleges are changing remedial education
Fueled by research and the imperative to raise graduation rates, some
institutions are revising or altogether replacing developmental classes.
James Paterson
June 19, 2019
Well-intentioned remedial education courses, and the testing that too
often imprecisely places students in them, may be doing more harm than
good.
That's according to a surge of research and exploratory initiatives
that suggest colleges could replace them with a mix of assessment
methods and alternative supports to move students ahead while catching
them up.
"Developmental education was designed to help students, but it didn't
really work," said Christopher Mullin, director of Strong Start to
Finish, a college access advocacy group that works with institutions to
improve remedial education. "Now there is a lot of energy out there to
find a better alternative."
The research is extensive and straightforward. Although about half of
first-year students are found to require remedial classes in either
math, English or both, the assessments colleges use to make that
decision vary widely and don't always reflect students' potential
success with college-level coursework.
In one case, researchers found that about one-fourth of students in
remedial math and one-third in remedial English were "severely
mis-assigned" to the courses using common test-based methods, and that
many could have earned at least a B in a regular college course.
What's more, students who take remedial classes are generally less
likely to graduate within six years than are their peers who didn't
take such courses.
"Traditional approaches to college preparedness are increasingly
scrutinized because their outcomes are poor, by and large," said
Patrick Partridge, president of WGU Academy, the new remedial education
platform offered by Western Governors University, one of the nation's
biggest online colleges.
They're also costly. Research puts the total annual expense to students
and families at $1.3 billion and to colleges at $7 billion.
Using 'multiple measures'
Although test scores determine most remedial class placements, low-risk
students often thrive when other factors — particularly a combination
of them — are used instead. Those tend to include GPA, college entrance
exams and work experience.
"For some time, we knew the two primary assessments (the ACT's Compass
and the College Board's Accuplacer) for placement into remediation were
not doing a very good job of predicting how students would do in
college courses, and we had been thinking about other information we
could use," said Sarah Truelsch, director of policy research at the
City University of New York (CUNY).
The system has been a leader in trying new ways to assess, place and
boost struggling students as they enter college. "We found that even
high school grades were much more closely aligned with success in
college," she said.
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