Illinois Developmental Education Reform Act (DERA) - Where are we 2 years in?
Two years ago, Illinois passed DERA the Developmental Education Reform Act, as part of House Bill 2170. The end goal of this law is to maximize the probability that a student can complete a math and an English college level credit within two semesters. Kathleen Almy of Almy Education has been supporting colleges in Illinois and elsewhere with their redesign of developmental education to meet this and laws from other states for the past four years. In this webinar, Kathleen talks about what she has learned and shares what works to make real progress in supporting students to achieve college credit.
We often think of student success as a result of what happens in the classroom. But real success happens because college systems and the culture as a whole are structured to promote student success. Many colleges have used corequisites as a way to engage students in college-level courses while providing the supports they need to be successful. Some colleges continue to have stand-alone not-for-credit developmental courses to prepare students for success. Regardless of your college’s requirements and current stage, this webinar provides concrete examples of what works to take your developmental education redesign to the next level.
Learning from Each Other
Redesigning a program takes work. For a redesign to be successful, it takes targeted work. Almy Education’s accelerator program has regular check ins with schools to keep momentum when redesigning developmental education. Redesigns can stall when people get burnt out or suffer from initiative fatigue when new laws are enacted or accreditation comes around. Sometimes there are disagreements and a lack of compromise with how to conduct a redesign. And sometimes there is a struggle with getting useful data that could show whether change is occurring.
Kathleen Almy works with colleges in ASPIRE (Accelerating Student Progress and Increasing Racial Equity, a part of Women Employed) and PCC (Partnership for College Completion) implementing the accelerator program to support redesign. The regular check ins are used to celebrate wins, discuss challenges, and solve problems. Kathleen and Almy Education is a connecting point, providing resources and some professional development and crowdsourcing information. For example, one school was struggling with Banner and another school said “we have a Banner wizard.” So Kathleen was able to connect the two schools and with this networking, the problem was fixed.
Lessons Learned with Implementation
The biggest lesson learned to make developmental education redesign successful is “go further than you're initially comfortable with.” We are often concerned that if we do too much, we're going to be doing harm. That goes off of the assumption that we're not doing harm now. But we are doing harm to our students without even realizing it. For example, we used to think corequisites were only for students who almost placed at the college level. Turns out that corequisites are beneficial for a lot more students than that.
Lewis & Clark Community College is a good example of going further than was comfortable. They went to scale with corequisites in both English and Math in 2016 and made coreqs the default for students. While they were making changes before then that appear to be effective, using coreqs was a campus wide change that impacted graduation in the positive. Lewis and Clark CC is heavily focused on the data that helps them refine their implementation.
Black Hawk College decided to “rip off the bandaid” and add more coreqs while pulling back on course offerings that were not coreqs. This caused more students to sign up for coreq. Changing the schedule can be a simple but effective modification. But you will have to be cognizant of faculty schedules and their teaching loads!
At Kishwaukee College, non-STEM bound students take either a college level math course or corequisites. There is no developmental prealgebra course, which used to be the norm for students who may be cognitively lower when it comes to math. Instead, prealgebra concepts are included in other courses, and they’re included in context which means students are more likely to remember and apply these concepts. Removing pre-college-level options may seem drastic, but with student supports, it can work.
When given options, students may not want to take corequisites because of the additional time and cost involved. Joe Bergman from Illinois Central College shared a creative way to make corequisites more attractive for students. The college has instituted a voucher program so if students sign up for a corequisite and pass, they receive a credit voucher for future semesters. Students have an incentive to take a corequisite while making it cost neutral. This long term thinking about student enrollment helped to convince the school’s board that the short term loss of revenue with the voucher is made up with the long term investment of students who stay in school, creating a win-win situation.
Going Further with Redesign
If you are implementing a redesign and it is relatively easy, then you likely did not learn the biggest lesson of “go further than you're initially comfortable with.” But redesign is not a “one and done” situation. You need to continuously assess and tweak the system to meet your college’s and students’ needs. After implementing changes in the redesign phase, you will continuously go through an iteration phase to make needed improvements to the system.
The use of data during the iteration phase is a must. Often we use lagging indicators, like graduation rates, to determine success of implementation. But more immediate data can inform our decision making in the short term. Lewis & Clark College invested in a sophisticated dashboard that gathers detailed data that has helped with their redesign efforts. For example, they were able to see that Black male students who got a D in a corequisite were more likely to graduate or accumulate credit hours than students in a comparable cohort that didn't have corequisites. This supports the idea that corequisites promote students' success. Another college was able to use their data dashboard to show that if students got a D or an F in an entry chemistry class or an entry math class, they were very likely to leave the school. This may prompt the college to design additional supports for students struggling in these entry courses.
In the absence of a good data dashboard, other readily-available information can be used to see where a college is in their redesign efforts and to look at push it to the next level. Start with the college’s course offerings and schedules. How many sections of the lowest level math courses are available? These courses can be available for the small population (about 10%) of students who truly need them because of cognitive challenges. Other developmental courses may be needed for another 20-30% of students so they can achieve what they need for college-level courses.
The majority of your college’s course offerings should be college-level, with or without corequisites. If you have corequisites, how many credit hours are they? If they are 6 or more credit hours, this could be detrimental in terms of financial aid or insurance should students need to drop the course. Note that credit hours and contact hours are not the same. You may consider making a corequisite count like a lab course where there are more contact hours than credit hours.
One system wide tweak is to reduce or remove options for students, like Kishwaukee College. If you have a developmental prealgebra course, then remove it and instead, embed prealgebra concepts into the college level courses. This opens the door to allow more students to take corequisite courses rather than developmental courses or stand alone courses that they may not yet be ready for. If you have bridge courses, then encourage more students to use them to be ready for college level math.
If you have too many developmental courses in the schedule, and students are being placed into them, it may be that placement measures need to be adjusted. Ask your testing center how many placement tests are being taken and with what students. Placement tests are not accurate stand-alone measures of students’ math ability, but may be useful in conjunction with other measures.
Likewise, you may ask whether students in college algebra truly need that course for their future. This is a gateway course for STEM majors or for transfer credit, but can be challenging and lead to low pass rates. If students are undecided with their major, advisors can be coached to place students in a non-algebra college course. You may also consider crafting a shared statement clarifying which students should be in these advanced classes. For students who do need these courses, embedding a tutor in a classroom can help students receive individual help when they need it most.
Simple scales
These two words are a good summary for how to make redesign happen successfully. Continuously ask the question “Could we simplify ___?” and fill in the blank with anything - placement, advising, registration, etc. The more you can simplify processes, the easier it will be for students, advisors, instructors, and the whole college to implement changes. And ultimately, the more successful your redesign will be.
Take Aways:
Go beyond your comfort level with your redesign
Schedule more corequisite courses to encourage students to enroll
Consider ways to incentivize students to take corequisites
Use available data to tweak redesign appropriately
Simplify processes within and across college systems