Some Colleges Try to Catch Students Up Before They’re Behind

This entry was posted on 04.14.14, in Assessment, Community College, Curriculum, Postsecondary, Secondary (9-12), Students. Bookmark the permalink.

Community colleges contend with a difficult reality: Many students show up unready for college-level work, and few of them catch up and graduate. To shift that status quo, as campuses around the country introduce new models of remedial, or developmental, education, some are trying to reduce the need for it.

The American Association of Community Colleges set a bold goal at its annual meeting here this week: to decrease by half the number of students who come to college unprepared. In presentations on Sunday and Monday, administrators and faculty members shared ideas for how to do that, describing new partnerships with local school districts to offer the colleges’ remedial courses to high-school students. Catch them up, the thinking goes, before they’re behind.

William Penn Senior High School needs that kind of intervention, presenters from Harrisburg Area Community College said here. The college’s York campus, in south central Pennsylvania, sees more students from nearby William Penn than almost anywhere else. Ninety-two percent place into remedial reading, and 100 percent into remedial mathematics. <Read more.>

Via Sara Lipka, The Chronicle of Higher Education.