For a high-school dropout with punctuation problems, enrolling in English 101 while catching up in remedial writing was a crucial opportunity. Halfway across the country, an 18-year-old freshman who skated through high school with a backpack full of loose papers learned to organize his notes in a five-subject binder.
Such “high-impact practices"—in those cases, fast-track remediation and mandatory study-skills courses—help community-college students become more engaged and, as a result, more successful, according to a report released on Thursday by the Center for Community College Student Engagement at the University of Texas here.
The report, “A Matter of Degrees: Engaging Practices, Engaging Students,” identifies a dozen practices as highly effective, for the small number of students who typically take advantage of them. It offers suggestions on how, in a time of budget cutting, institutions can extend to more students the often voluntary experiences.
“Because colleges aren’t requiring them, you have these innovative practices arrayed around the margins,” said Kay M. McClenney, director of the student-engagement center. “But the rest of the college goes along untransformed.”
The stakes are high. Six years after entering community college, less than half of students who started with a goal of earning a degree or certificate have a credential, have transferred to a four-year institution, or remain enrolled in community college.
The report is based on four surveys that generated responses from about 100,000 entering students, 458,000 more-experienced students, and 36,000 faculty and staff members at about 440 colleges. It is supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates and Lumina Foundations and is co-sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching; the center that published it is part of Austin’s Community College Leadership Program.
The other practices that the report says propel students to the finish line are assessment and placement, orientation, first-year experiences, academic goal setting and planning, class-attendance policies, tutoring, supplemental instruction, learning communities, experiential learning beyond the classroom, and alert and intervention systems.
For both entering students and those who have been enrolled longer, the report shows the relationship between participating in the activities and benchmark scores on student engagement. Individual colleges that participated in the survey can also compare their own students’ scores to national figures.
But as well-intentioned educators often find out, offering programs is one thing. Getting students to sign up is another. The report found considerable gaps between the presence of resources and students’ participation.
For instance, while two-thirds of colleges had a process for helping new students set academic goals, less than half of students did so during their first term, according to the report. More than 60 percent of colleges offered first-year experience programs, but less than 30 percent of students took part.
“I’ve become the queen of the phrase ‘Students don’t do optional,’ which will be engraved on my tombstone,” said Ms. McClenney. Yet they need the help, she argued: If students participate in more than one success strategy, the benefits to them are even greater, she said. “It’s the highly engaged students who survive.”
Extending Benefits
Sprinkled throughout the report are examples of what the center sees as effective campus programs, many of which are mandatory. At Zane State College, for instance, all entering students—about 1,000 a year—are required to take an entrance test and attend an intensive, five-day orientation course, followed by one-on-one and group advising. The Ohio college’s efforts, most of which began in 2005, have paid off, with an 11-percentage-point jump in retention rates for the most at-risk students from 2006 to 2011.
A major challenge community colleges face is helping underprepared students get to credit-bearing courses as quickly as possible. One model for that is building intensive support into an introductory course in a way that doesn’t dumb down the curriculum or otherwise shortchange more-advanced students, issues that educators in Florida are grappling with after lawmakers made remediation optional for most students there.
Nationally, even when students have accelerated or fast-track options, they often don’t sign up, the report found. Less than three in 10 remedial, or developmental, students take an accelerated course, even though nearly seven in 10 colleges offer them. In many cases, the participation rate is constrained by limited sections of such courses.
At the Community College of Baltimore County, students who score near the remedial cut on a placement test can choose to take catch-up and college-level English courses concurrently. The same instructor teaches both, usually during consecutive class periods. And in early pilots, students’ success rates have more than doubled, with 74 percent of participants completing English 101, compared with the 33 percent of comparable-level students in traditional remediation who eventually pass the college-level course.
Cossondre Bahr, 22, dropped out of school at age 15 when her son was born, and although she now has a GED, the time away from the classroom left her a little rusty. When her placement test put her in remedial English at Baltimore County, her advisers suggested the dual option. “I was kind of disappointed that I didn’t do as well on the placement test, but now, I’m super-happy that I placed into this accelerated class,” she said. By starting out in English 101, with extra help, she said, “I get the best of both worlds.”
Student-success courses, another high-impact practice according to the report, were offered at 84 percent of colleges surveyed. But because the courses usually weren’t required, less than 30 percent of students had signed up in their first term.
In the sprawling Houston Community College System, however, they have to. The system’s 16 campuses all require new and transfer students to take a study-skills course like Education 1300, which covers topics such as time management, effective listening, financial literacy, and career awareness. By the end of the semester, students have to declare a major and file a degree plan. Since the system introduced the requirement, in 2007, persistence rates have improved significantly for both remedial and college-level students.
Attila Moseley, 18, said he’d learned to capture the most important points in notes he takes on lectures he records—and to prioritize schoolwork when his friends want to hang out. “This is helping me buckle down and study effectively,” he said of the study-skills course at Houston.
Experiential learning is another effective but underused offering on many campuses, the report notes. An exception is Kapi’olani Community College, where such opportunities are woven into the curriculum. Each year, dozens of students tutor children in mathematics, and more than 100 students help restore Native Hawaiian watershed ecosystems. Such experiences pay off in students’ grades: 89 percent of participating students earned a C or better in the spring of 2011, compared with 71 percent of nonparticipants.
Informed Decisions
Introducing a high-impact practice takes more than identifying it. And Ms. McClenney is pressing colleges to take action. “Some of these approaches are so intuitively obvious,” she said, “you have to wonder why more colleges aren’t doing this in a more systematic way for all students.”
The answer, of course, is that the offerings take time and money—two resources in short supply at many community colleges.
Knowing which practices give the most bang for the buck and which could be made mandatory or phased out is key, Ms. McClenney said. To free up money to add or extend offerings that promote engagement, colleges could reduce course offerings, she said, or advise students in groups rather than individually.
Examining data is vital, the report argues: “Colleges must make decisions—about every hour spent, every dollar allocated, every policy set, and every practice implemented—based on whether those decisions will make engagement inescapable for large numbers of their students.”
The most successful strategies, the research center found, present information in contexts that are relevant to students and provide clear pathways to achieving goals, whether a certificate, a degree, or a job.
The report, the second in a series of three by the center, follows one last year that found “pockets of success rather than widespread improvement.”
After this look at students’ engagement, the third report, due next fall, will examine how students’ participation in high-impact practices affects outcomes such as course completion, credit hours earned, and persistence.
