Researchers at the University of Delaware assessed 10 years of data on completion rates for Tennessee college students after the state eliminated remedial education courses. The results: temporary benefits but no real change in graduation rates.
In 2015, the State of Tennessee eliminated remedial English and math courses for community college students. Instead, students with limited English and math skills took co-requisite courses designed to let them build competencies without delaying their abilities to take transferrable courses for credit.
The researchers found that despite initial success in passing rates, students who would have been directed to remedial education courses slowed their enrollments. By the end of the third year (after the students’ first enrollment) these students had accumulated – on average – the same number of credits that their counterparts who had been steered into remedial courses.
In other words, there was ultimately no difference in the number of credits that students with skill deficiencies accumulated, whether they took remedial education classes or took co-requisite classes. Ten years of data from Tennessee show that neither approach to building or reclaiming academic skills was superior – or even productive.
There’s no doubt that some students benefit from learning and relearning language and analysis skills. But there’s ample evidence to suggest that this approach doesn’t have any positive impact on students in this group.
The study does suggest that students who are least likely to come to a community college with their language and math skills in prime condition are also least likely to complete a course of study. The new data don’t point the finger at the method of remediation. Rather, they point to different causes for the students’ lack of long-term success.
Re-examining remedial education
Tennessee isn’t the only state that has said goodbye to remedial education at the post-secondary level. About half of all states have ditched the remedial education approach in favor of co-requisites for students with skill deficits. Michigan happens to be among the states that don’t want to offer remedial education to post-secondary students anymore. The decision was made a couple of years ago to pursue co-requisites rather than pre-requisites
Using the argument that most students who test into remedial level classes have already learned the material in a remedial course once. Rather than make these students re-learn the material from scratch, co-requisites allow them to revisit the material and remember what they already know.
The problem with this approach is that students may perform poorly on language and computation exams because they never learned the material in the first place. There’s nothing to re-learn for a student who has never acquired these skills. Further, students who tend to have low ACT scores in high school have a higher likelihood of landing in remedial courses, and a lower likelihood of completing a degree or certificate.
But the reason for the low success rate among these students probably isn’t academic. The survey suggested that these students are also more likely to leave school for family, work, or financial reasons – not academic performance. Rather than torturing students with additional classes that they may not be prepared to tackle, it may be time to build strategies that correctly identify and address the causes of low achievement and address those instead.
Photo Credit: Lauren, via Flickr
