Description
ABSTRACT
Developmental education focuses on addressing the needs of underprepared, diverse student populations seeking a postsecondary education. However, developmental education has received much criticism for its perceived incongruence between expenditures allocated for
developmental education programs and sustainable student success outcomes. With a large percentage of entering community college students being considered underprepared and students of color, this translates to an ever-expanding number of this population being relegated to remedial or developmental education programs. Of the aforesaid, African-American students and Hispanic students oftentimes comprise much of the
remedial or developmental education program’s population. Moreover, traditional remedial or developmental courses are comprised of lengthy course sequences designed to scaffold learning in deficit areas as identified through institutional placement assessment tools. The completion of these course sequences is required prior to students’ eligibility for enrollment into college-level courses, which results in less than encouraging rates of developmental education students’ completion, especially for African-American males and Hispanic males. To address this circumstance, many states have turned to developmental education reform efforts. These efforts include approaches such as accelerated remediation models.
Accelerated remediation models are designed to fast track developmental program sequences through mechanisms such as co-requisite remediation models.
Co-requisite models are intended to improve student success outcomes and completion rates for developmental education students. The purpose of this qualitative study is to examine the efficacy of the developmental education reforms for Integrated Reading and Writing (INRW)
as they pertain to African-American males and Hispanic males placed into reading-based and writing-based co-requisites at Houston Community College. Data were re-examined from a previous study of the college’s co-requisite implementation, which includes interviews, observations, and a review of documents. Results of the study indicated that reading-based and writing-based co-requisites potentially offer effective outcomes. The results were analyzed to provide recommendations to improve the college’s co-requisite efforts.
KEY WORDS: Developmental education, co-requisite
