Line between classes blurs

Fewer students testing into development courses once they reach college

A new law getting rid of remedial college courses in Colorado won’t take effect until 2022, but schools already are shifting away from a traditional sequence of lower-level classes that students have to pass before they can start earning credits.

Statewide, more than one-third of students who entered higher education in 2017 were flagged by their college as being behind in math, English or both. Data from the 2018 school year isn’t available yet, but Colorado’s overall remediation rate has fluctuated between 33% and 40% since 2009.

For a long time, the philosophy in higher education was that it was better to catch all students who were behind and send them through remediation — having them take courses designed to cover the basic skills they’d need in a subject before moving forward with regular coursework.

But quite a few dropped out, said Katie Zaback, senior policy director at the Colorado Department of Higher Education. In 2012, Colorado colleges started pairing regular, for-credit classes with supplemental instruction to help students catch up on the skills they need for a particular course, she said.

“It’s shown very significant gains,” she said.

Colleges’ supplemental instruction programs vary, but they generally aren’t limited to students who tested into remedial classes.

Sarah Lamprecht, a junior majoring in sustainable systems engineering at Metropolitan State University of Denver, participated in supplemental instruction for

calculus and general chemistry. She had a strong enough command of math that she wouldn’t have had to take a remedial class if Metro State offered them, but said she found it helpful to practice with a group and discuss different ways of understanding the problems.

Lamprecht, who is going to lead a supplemental instruction group in chemistry this fall, said the groups she attended had a mix of students who were struggling and others who wanted to improve their study habits.

“It really does help everyone,” she said.

The college has a similar option for English. Jessica Parker, director of the first-year writing program at Metro State, said the school offers an extra hour of instruction each week for students who might struggle in their freshman composition class. There, they can work on grammar and organizing their writing, she said. She estimated about 70% of incoming freshmen need some additional instruction on writing.

“Our approach says every student who comes here is capable of collegelevel writing,” she said. “We tell them we will get you in the right class and if you do the work, you will succeed.”

Redesigning students’ “pathways”

Shelly Ray, chair of the math department at Community College of Aurora, said colleges across the country are working on redesigning their math “pathways” so students don’t get stuck and drop out. That involves creating different paths — not everyone needs calculus — and offering support along the way so students don’t have to take multiple remedial classes before they begin to earn credits, she said.

“The majority of people who don’t finish college, they didn’t finish because they didn’t finish a math class,” she said. “Students were getting stuck in long developmental sequences and they were never getting to their college-level math course.”

Community College of Aurora redesigned its developmental classes so that students only take one remedial class before diving into their credit-bearing courses, Ray said. Many students don’t even need to take that if they sign up for a supplemental math class that gives them some extra help with the concepts in their main class, as well as teaching time management and study habits, she said.

“We’re hitting the gaps in the mathematics course and also emphasizing how to be a better college student,” Ray said. “It helps students build confidence.”

Colleges also are gradually shifting away from placement tests, and it’s not clear what that will mean for data about remediation. Currently, the Colorado Department of Higher Education tracks how many students from each district either are placed in a remedial class based on a placement test, or choose to take one because they think they need additional help before starting a credit-bearing class.

Community College of Denver, for example, now allows students to avoid the placement test if their high school grades or scores on the SAT or ACT demonstrate they can handle a college-level math class.

Fewer Denver students need remediation

Most Denver-area school districts have improved their remediation rates over the last decade, though the number of students needing extra help varied widely. In 2017, the most recent year with data, the rates ranged from 21% of graduates of Littleton Public Schools needing remediation to 74% of Sheridan School District graduates.

Maegan Daigler, director of assessment at Sheridan, said the district’s small size makes its numbers more variable. In 2017, only 31 Sheridan students enrolled in college, and some years the number is so small that the Colorado Department of Education doesn’t report it because of privacy concerns.

Daigler said she’s seen progress as more Sheridan students are attending four-year universities, though some need additional help when they get there.

“As a district, we need to shift our high school practices to better monitor that our students are graduating remediation-free in literacy and math,” she said in a written statement.

Of 13 districts near Denver, 10 had a lower remediation rate in 2017 than in 2009, with Mapleton Public Schools and Denver Public Schools showing the largest improvement. Nine of the 13 districts improved in at least half of the last eight years, which suggests some momentum.

Bernard McCune, senior executive director for career and college success at DPS, said concurrent enrollment is one way the district is trying to reduce the number of students who need remediation. Students can take remedial or freshman-level English and math classes at a community college while still in high school, and those who earn a C or better won’t need further remediation before they can pursue college courses, he said in an email.

Zaback, with the Colorado Department of Higher Education, cautioned against putting too much emphasis on remediation rates, however. Universities vary in their testing policies and what exam they use, so it’s impossible to be sure that all students have the same odds of being flagged as needing remediation, she said.

“A student who goes to a two-year institution has a higher chance of being tested,” she said.

Placement tests also aren’t perfect, because reading passages and word problems may reference subjects some students aren’t familiar with, while other students may underperform because of nerves, Zaback said. She expects more colleges to start using alternative methods, like high school grade point average, to place students starting in 2020.

“GPA is a much stronger measure because it’s a measure of a student’s full education,” she said.