Developmental Education Redesign

Team Leader: Leanne Frost

Team Members
Heidi Pasek, Mark Plante, Jana Carter, Jill Keil, Mandy Wright, Becky Johnson, Courtney Johnsrud, Dena Wagner-Fossen, Leah Habel, Steve Opheim

Goal IV – Curricular and Pedagogical Reform

Task A. Building from current research, reform and redesign the developmental education offerings to increase the percent of students who are successfully remediated for college-level coursework and at the rate in which they succeed in this process.

Purpose
The simplicity of the project title “Developmental  Education Redesign” belies the complexity of this team’s tasks: To take dev ed courses that too often have served as multi-semester roadblocks to students eager to undertake college-level courses and turn them into productive college-prep courses that prepare students  to succeed in college level classes as quickly as possible.

Strategy
The work began with data collection and analysis. For example, the team is looking at students who score above and below certain points in the placement exams and how many of them in each group stay in school in the following semester and the following year, is comparing the success rates of students in college-level courses who took a development education course with those who did not and looking at how students with reading scores below a certain level perform in various college-level courses.

The team also has visited MSU-Billings, which has a strong developmental education program, and the University of Maryland to study its course redesign efforts, will be evaluating off-the-shelf instructional packages and is reviewing the California Acceleration Project writing program.

Additional strategies include student focus groups and reviewing relevant literature.

Timeline
This project has one of the longest timelines of all the Common Ground timelines, partly because of its complexity and partly because of scheduling requirements for launching and evaluating pilot courses and then implementing the final course. The primary targets are to incorporate some changes in WRIT 095 for Spring 2012 and pilot a modular math course in Summer 2012.