Enhancing Rigor in Developmental Education

Volume 1, Issue 4 High rates of remediation, low completion rates, and increasing demands for a skilled workforce have made developmental education reform a focus of many community college improvement efforts. Colleges across the nation are restructuring their developmental education programs to strengthen students’ academic preparation and accelerate their progression through remediation. However, data from the Community College Research Center’s Scaling Innovation project suggest that colleges must do more than revamp course content or course structures to achieve these preparation and progression goals.1 Colleges must also increase the academic rigor of developmental coursework, moving beyond “skill-and-drill” approaches2 to cultivate in students the knowledge, skills, and habits necessary to sustain academic success. Most developmental education coursework reteaches primary or secondary curricula, with a focus on developing discrete subskills. Instructors generally teach sentence, paragraph, and essay construction separately in writing courses and teach vocabulary, comprehension, and inference separately in reading courses. In math courses, students practice the steps for solving problems but rarely engage with the underlying mathematical concepts. Despite their widespread use, these approaches do not appear to be generating strong and sustained learning outcomes;3 more rigorous approaches are needed to fully prepare developmental students for collegelevel courses. Enhancing rigor in developmental education requires practitioners to fundamentally rethink course content and instructional strategies in ways that promote high expectations, depth of understanding, and transfer of knowledge to new settings. High expectations are reflected in challenging course content and tasks that require students to raise questions, reason, solve problems, communicate, and reflect upon their learning.4 Depth of understanding is derived from consistent practice in developing higher order thinking skills and is critical to knowledge transfer. For knowledge transfer to occur, students must not only possess sufficient content knowledge but also understand how, when, and why to adapt and apply that knowledge in novel situations.5 Creating a rigorous learning environment is difficult for even the most experienced instructor, and the developmental education context presents a distinct challenge for educators. How can instructors prepare students for college-level courses and beyond when many students enter the classroom with significant knowledge gaps and lack the motivation required for academic success? This issue of Inside Out addresses this question by describing how community college faculty are working to increase rigor within reformed developmental education classrooms. We focus on three strategies instructors have utilized to create a more rigorous curriculum and new instructional approaches, and we describe faculty and student experiences with these strategies in developmental courses.