Saturday, March 5, 2011

Remediation in community colleges

The New York Times reports on remediation in community colleges:

The knowledge gap at community colleges is increasingly being recognized as a national problem. About 65 percent of all community college students nationwide need some form of remedial education, with students’ shortcomings in math outnumbering those in reading by 2 to 1 . . . .

Nationwide, as at CUNY, fewer than half of students directed to take one or more remedial classes — “developmental education” is the term administrators prefer — complete them.
The saddest thing in this article is the lament of a student newly aware of his deficits in mathematics, reading, and writing: “‘Throughout high school, I was a good math student, and to find out that it was my lowest grade of all three was really surprising.’”

comments: 3

Elaine said...

They don't know what they don't know...

normann said...

What are they teaching in "math" classes these days? And, more to the point, how are they evaluating what is taught? What this young man needed was an honest, but kind, appraisal of his aptitude and performance. Instead he was allowed by default to persist in the delusion that he was a "good math student".

I used to quip that educationists have imposed the Dodo standard on evaluating student performance (Everyone has won, and all must have prizes!), in effect, treating normal K-12 students like Special Olympians (whence the pressure on college instructors). Now we see the results.

Ted Major said...

Worse still, at least two studies have shown that "students who participated in remediation did no better on several outcome measures than similar students who enrolled directly in college-level courses."