For as long as he can remember, Robert T. Calloway has had a fascination with engineering and all things mechanical. He wanted to pursue an engineering career despite a diagnosis of dyslexia, which challenged both his confidence and his ability in the classroom.
“I first learned I had dyslexia when I was in the Army,” he says. “My platoon sergeant would make us read technical manuals. He noticed that I had a problem with loop letters, like p’s, b’s, d’s, and q’s.”
Mr. Calloway, who is 42, weighed his options as he neared the end of his military service, in 2005. He decided that somehow, some way, he had to pursue a higher education, to better provide financially for his two teenagers.
That fall he enrolled in the Community College of Allegheny County, in Pittsburgh, where professors and the college’s academic-support staff helped him work around his dyslexia.
Now, a program being developed by a two-year college in Vermont aims to assess the successful practices of Allegheny and other colleges to help more students, like Mr. Calloway, succeed academically in math and the sciences.
Landmark College, in Putney, Vt., was created to serve students with learning disabilities. It has a 25-year history of preparing students for a range of fields, including the STEM disciplines—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
The college won two federal grants last year and one grant this year, totaling more than $1-million, that will be used to help finance its STEM project. The grants, from the Department of Education and the National Science Foundation, are a part of the government’s larger focus on producing more math-and-science graduates.
Steve Fadden, vice president for research and institute operations at Landmark, is using the money to develop a curriculum to teach educators how to support students in the STEM fields who have various learning disabilities, including dyslexia, autism, Asperger’s syndrome, and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Arne Duncan, U.S. secretary of education, expressed concern in October that only 23 percent of college freshmen were declaring STEM majors. What’s more, “just 40 percent of those that elect STEM majors freshman year receive a STEM degree within six years,” he told the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
To develop its one-semester course for educators, Landmark is collaborating with three other community colleges—Western Nevada College, in Carson City; Lone Star College, in Houston; and the Community College of Allegheny County—because students with disabilities tend to be overrepresented in two-year institutions.
Students with learning disabilities, Mr. Fadden says, have hidden problem-solving strengths. They live in a world that does not often conform to their learning style, constantly presenting challenges that require solutions. Instructors, he says, need to know how to tap into those strengths.
Meeting Outside Class
Two years after he enrolled at Allegheny, Mr. Calloway graduated with an associate degree in precision fabrication, another in robotics and automation technology, and a professional certificate in computer-aided drafting and design. He has since transferred to Point Park University, where he is a junior double-majoring in mechanical-engineering technology and global cultural studies.
Key to his success, Mr. Calloway says, were community-college professors who met with him before or after class to offer extra help on assignments. They also introduced him to tools for students with learning disabilities, including a software program that essentially scans text to create an audio version of a book.
He now trains other students to use the same tools, working as a technical-support specialist for students with disabilities at Allegheny.
Mr. Fadden, of Landmark, intends to capitalize on the role that both instructors and support-staff members can play in helping students with learning disabilities succeed in the STEM fields. The college’s project will culminate in an interactive pilot course, which is expected to be put into use for technology instructors and academic-support staff members this fall at the participating community colleges.
The course will teach instructors how to help students with learning disabilities study better, prepare for job interviews, use assisted-learning software, and work in groups, among other skills that Mr. Fadden says students are ordinarily expected to know instinctively.
“You might have a professor who says, ‘I want a 15-page paper that’s due by a certain time on a certain topic,’” Mr. Fadden explains. But some students “don’t really know what that means, because no one has truly sat down and told them, ‘Here’s what a college-level paper looks like.’”
The results of the educator-training program could enable community-college faculty and staff members to help not only students with learning disabilities, Mr. Fadden says, but also a broader range of students who might enter college in need of academic assistance—for example, those learning English who are struggling with reading comprehension.
Sandi H. Patton, director of disability services at Lone Star College, says the college has about 730 students with diagnosed learning disabilities out of a total enrollment of about 62,000.
In joining with Landmark, Ms. Patton says, she hopes to create “a culture of inclusion” by increasing awareness, among administrators and faculty and staff members alike, of students with learning disabilities and their needs. Another goal is to increase the retention and graduation rates of students with learning disabilities, who she says often have a talent for the “hands on” subjects offered in the STEM fields.
“We want to see these students be successful,” she says. “We want to help and retain them in achieving their educational and vocational goals.”
Esther M. Mason, director of support services for students with disabilities at Allegheny, says the college joined Landmark’s project because of the focus on work-force development. Allegheny wants to produce “students who can go on and get successful careers in the STEM programs,” she says, citing Mr. Calloway as an example of just such a student.
Mr. Calloway, who wants to pursue a master’s degree in manufacturing, says getting extra assistance helped him to achieve his dream of pursuing engineering. “The most exciting thing is when I actually see something I thought of in my mind on paper,” he says. “Especially when we’re able to design and I can say, ‘This will actually work.’”
Mr. Fadden says qualitative data, including students’ beliefs about their abilities before and after they receive help from an educator who took the pilot course, will be used to determine the success of the joint program.
If the course developed during the summer is successful, he says, it could be used at other community colleges, thereby helping more students with learning disabilities receive the academic support they need.
