Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Editors' Notes

2014; Wiley; Volume: 2014; Issue: 167 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/cc.20105

1536-0733

Katherine L. Hughes, Andrea Venezia,

Higher Education Research Studies

Significant pressure is on community colleges—and all higher education institutions—to increase student completion rates. As the ability to track students’ progress through college has improved, the inability to effectively support many—and in some cases most—students through to graduation has become of national concern. Multistate initiatives such as Achieving the Dream, Completion by Design, the Developmental Education Initiative, and Complete College America, along with math reform efforts such as Statway, Quantway, and the New Mathways, have emerged and built upon one another in driving change grounded in evidence. Pressure from the Obama administration, philanthropic foundations, industry representatives, state policymakers, and others has spurred a sharp focus on the kinds of supports, incentives, and programmatic changes necessary to help a larger proportion of students succeed. This all comes after years of budget-cutting at the federal, state, and local levels, along with ongoing demographic changes that, when combined, are forcing postsecondary education systems and institutions to do more with less for an often increasingly underprepared entering student body. The Winter 2013 volume of New Directions for Community Colleges, titled The College Completion Agenda: Practical Approaches for Reaching the Big Goal (Phillips & Horowitz, 2013), presented informative articles addressing reforms of different aspects of community colleges, such as the role of leadership in transforming institutional culture, using data to drive change, re-designing academic pathways to better encourage student persistence and completion, and the importance of financial aid, among other topics. These, together, illustrate that the field has made significant progress in developing the knowledge and strategies needed to increase credential completion. This volume builds on that work in providing a set of chapters that elucidate the change processes underway in institutions and classrooms. The following chapters, mostly authored or coauthored by practitioners, describe the catalysts, the efforts, the false starts and mistakes, and the successes achieved. The aim is to add to the growing body of literature on evidence-based change in a way that helps practitioners understand clearly how these innovations were developed, implemented, and scaled, so as to apply lessons regarding replication in different contexts and under different conditions. Overburdened and resource-strapped community college educators need not reinvent reform strategies but can learn from those already initiated and in place. As developmental education has been receiving intensive scrutiny as of late, the volume includes three chapters describing new approaches that are showing improved student outcomes. Susan Bickerstaff, Maria Scott Cormier, and Di Xu, from the Community College Research Center, and Barbara Lontz, from Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania, present a case study of an arithmetic and prealgebra course redesign, Concepts of Numbers, that adopts a new instructional approach. Next, Peter Adams and Donna McKusick, of the Community College of Baltimore County, reflect on the development and growth of the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), the college's developmental writing program. Both chapters emphasize how course instructors needed significant support in teaching differently. And both courses are now being replicated in other institutions. Furthering the theme of scaling and spread of reform, the third chapter addressing developmental education, by Katie Hern with Myra Snell, tells a compelling tale of data-driven change through a community of practice across multiple colleges in California. These authors express clearly the many forces working against change—entrenched beliefs about students’ capabilities, lack of curricula and textbooks for reimagined courses, inflexible transfer articulation policies, and lack of policy support generally—that perseverance and presentation of evidence are breaking down, little by little. The next two chapters focus on new approaches to supporting students as they adjust to college, select courses and majors, and strive in the classroom. Mina Dadgar, Thad Nodine, Kathy Reeves Bracco, and Andrea Venezia argue for a better integration of institutions’ instruction and support services aspects and provide concrete examples from the field. They and others have pointed out the fact that community college students generally need far more support than the colleges’ resources allow, so building guidance and assistance into courses can be efficient as well as more effective than the status quo. Gary Rodwell outlines how an online navigation system can empower students to understand where they are in the “progression continuum” at their colleges and what lies ahead if they are to graduate. This, then, enables them to plan and make rational choices connected to their education goals. In the following chapter, Lenore Rodicio and Susan Mayer, of Miami Dade College, and Davis Jenkins, from the Community College Research Center, write of how the college has taken these ideas to full scale, with a college-wide overhaul of how entering students are advised and continuously guided through their programs. This has necessitated investing in additional advising staff, deeper involvement of faculty in student support, and a mapping of clear, structured program pathways to help in student decision making and more efficient completion. The result has been, as the authors characterize it, truly transformative change. Large-scale change is also underway in North Carolina, as R. Edward Bowling, Sharon Morrissey, and George M. Fouts, all community college practitioners, describe in their chapter. Through the community colleges’ involvement in Completion by Design (CBD), policy and practice changes are occurring within individual colleges, while state policy is evolving through a parallel process to support the scaling of those efforts statewide. While the colleges worked to develop clear, prescriptive pathways for students aligned with workforce needs, the State Advisory Board for the initiative (composed of postsecondary and K–12 leaders from across the state) developed a list of policy implications based on the colleges’ work for CBD. State policy changes were made to allow for alternative placement methods (a new diagnostic tool and high school transcripts) and to update the state's Comprehensive Articulation Agreement (to create a highly structured program of study for transfer students). Alison Kadlec and Isaac Rowlett of Public Agenda add a unique perspective to this volume. After leading engagement processes—and facilitating conversations with faculty, staff, and administrators—at colleges across the country, they bring their lens to the many factors that can support a reform process and those that can halt one. They cite factors such as size, access to resources, geographic position, policy environment, governance structure, multiple missions, the large proportion of adjunct faculty without the privileges of stable employment, and institutional culture and climate. A clear message that emerges is that change is not technical work; the human dimension of reform is quite powerful and needs great attention. Katherine L. Hughes is the executive director of Community College and Higher Education Initiatives at the College Board. Andrea Venezia is an associate professor of public policy and administration and the executive director of the Institute for Higher Education Leadership & Policy at California State University, Sacramento.