Studying the effects of remedial education is a little like studying the effects of heart surgery. Simply comparing the fates of those who underwent it with those who did not yields terribly misleading results. After all, one group generally starts out in much worse shape.
Three new studies of the effects of remedial programs seek to overcome this conundrum by limiting themselves to students who entered college with similar levels of academic preparation — just enough to be in a gray area where some of them ended up taking remedial classes, and others did not.
The researchers’ findings suggest that, on the whole, remedial programs deserve neither the bad rap they have received from some critics nor the faith placed in them by many advocates. In fact, on the whole, such programs do not have much long-term influence on students’ success.
“When you get to that apples-to-apples comparison,” the effect of college remedial programs on most students “is either slightly positive, slightly negative, or zero,” says Bridget Terry Long, an associate professor of education and economics at Harvard University who was involved in two of the studies.
Well over one-fourth of entering college students end up in remedial classes, and public colleges alone are estimated to spend more than $1-billion annually on remedial education. So the failure of such programs to produce substantial positive results “is not just something that can be swept under the rug anymore,” Ms. Long says. “Attacking this issue head-on is going to be absolutely necessary.”
The researchers involved with the three new studies caution that their methodology prevented them from looking at an entire subset of students: those who entered college so academically unprepared that they stood virtually no chance of going straight into regular academic classes.
They say the impact of remedial classes on such students remains an open question, and the only way to answer it may be to randomly assign some to remedial classes while placing others in regular academic courses — an approach that raises ethical questions.
Big-State Samples
Each of the three studies looks at a different state, and all exploit the existence of laws or policies that enabled the researchers to track the progress of large numbers of comparable remediated and nonremediated students over time.
In one, an as-yet-unpublished study of nearly 100,000 Florida community-college students, Ms. Long and Juan Carlos Calcagno, a senior research associate at the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, compared the long-term progress of students who scored just below the cutoff on a placement test — and were thus assigned to remedial classes — to the long-term progress of students who got into regular academic classes by scoring just above the cutoff.
In a paper summarizing their findings, Ms. Long and Mr. Calcagno say their results “suggest remediation has limited or mixed benefits.” Students who took remedial classes ended up earning more credits over all, but not significantly more credits that were college-level. Those marginal students who took remedial mathematics classes were slightly more likely to persist to their second year of college but did no better than other marginal students in their subsequent math courses. Taking a remedial reading class did not have any bearing on persistence, and the students who took such classes were actually less likely to pass college-level English composition classes down the road.
Two other experts reached similarly mixed conclusions in a federally financed study, based on Texas state data. The as-yet-unpublished study was conducted by Isaac McFarlin Jr., a research scientist at the University of Texas at Dallas and a visiting scholar at the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Francisco (Paco) Martorell, an associate economist at the RAND Corporation.
They did not find any evidence that students who took remedial reading or mathematics classes were more likely to earn a college degree than comparably prepared students who went straight into academic classes. In fact, at two-year colleges where a large proportion of students took remedial courses, those students were significantly less likely than other comparably prepared students to complete at least one year of college or earn a degree.
But contrary to the assumptions of many critics of remediation, the Texas study did not find any evidence that remediation significantly extended how long it took students to get through college.
Their analysis was based on Texas data on more than 255,000 students who entered two-year public colleges and more than 197,000 students who entered public four-year colleges during the 1990s.
Helping their efforts to make apples-to-apples comparisons between remediated and nonremediated students were inconsistencies in how Texas placed students in remedial classes. Some who initially failed a statewide placement test got out of remedial classes by passing the test on their second try. Other students who had passed the test nonetheless ended up in remedial classes because their advisers urged it or because they performed poorly on at least one of their colleges’ own placement tests. And when Texas raised the passing score on its statewide placement test in 1995, remedial classes took in many students who would have gone straight into academic classes the year before.
Subtle Differences
In a third study accepted for future publication in the Journal of Human Resources, Ms. Long and Eric P. Bettinger, an associate professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University, tracked the long-term progress of 28,000 students at two- and four-year public colleges in Ohio. Public colleges in that state vary greatly in their remediation and placement policies, meaning one institution might place a student in remedial classes, while another would send the same student straight into college-level classes.
The Ohio study found that students seemed to benefit from being placed in remedial classes. They were more likely than peers with comparable scores to persist in college and to earn a four-year degree, and less likely to transfer to a less-selective college.
Ms. Long says the discrepancies between the Ohio study and others may be due to the narrower subset of the population that it covered. The Ohio study was limited to traditional-age, full-time students who had taken the ACT and either attended a four-year college or indicated on their application to a two-year institution that they planned to complete a four-year degree.
Because the research shows substantial variation among states and colleges in terms of the benefits students reap from remedial classes, Ms. Long says, much more research needs to be done to figure out what policies work.
Kay M. McClenney, director of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, says she worries that by focusing on averages and overall numbers, the Texas study masks how some colleges are doing a very good job providing remedial education and have programs worthy of support.
“There are some colleges showing that it can be done, which takes away the excuses for all of the others,” she says. “There is a great deal that is known about what constitutes doing it well. We just need to do more.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Students Volume 54, Issue 43, Page A18