National groups call for major changes in remedial education. Remedial courses meant to get underprepared students ready for college-level work are often not an on-ramp but a dead end, leaders of four national higher-education groups said on Wednesday, recommending sweeping changes in how such students are brought up to speed.
Students required to take a sequence of remedial, or developmental, courses before they can sign up for credit-bearing ones often get discouraged and drop out, and many would be better off in gateway courses, with extra support built in, according to the groups' report, "Core Principles for Transforming Remedial Education: A Joint Statement."
The report—by Complete College America, the Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Education Commission of the States, and Jobs for the Future—is based on studies by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College and other organizations that have concluded that the nation's remedial-education system is broken.More developmental students should be placed directly into full-credit college courses, the report recommends, accompanied by services such as mandatory tutoring and facilitated computer labs.
Source: Start of article by Katherine Mangan in The Chronicle of Higher Education December 21, 2012
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