Every year, millions of community college students take a placement exam and find themselves in remedial or developmental education. Remedial coursework is intended to make students college ready, but in practical terms, it can siphon students off into years of coursework before they can start earning credits toward a degree.
A new report from the Community College Research Center (CCRC) at Columbia University sheds light on why developmental education may not be working at the community college level and offers some solutions. The report compares the relative success of a developmental math class offered at Tennessee high schools and community colleges.
Tennessee’s Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support (SAILS) was first developed as a dual enrollment program for high school seniors by Chattanooga State Community College in 2013. The program embeds the state’s developmental math program, Learning Support Mathematics (LSM), in its high schools. After showing early signs of success, SAILS was adopted by all 13 community colleges in the state, which now offer it at many of the state’s high schools.
SAILS and LSM are both “hybrid online” classes, with students taking modular remedial classes. No lectures are involved and students work at their own speed to complete the coursework. Yet CCRC research found that, even though the curriculum was the same, high school students taking the class had a much higher rate of success than their community college peers did.
“The high school students seemed so much more excited about it,” said Maggie P. Fay, a research associate at CCRC, who spoke with high school and community college students for the report.
Remedial education is a serious issue in Tennessee. According to the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, nearly 70 percent of Tennessee community college freshmen place into remedial coursework every year.
