Developmental education has come under scrutiny for delaying students’ academic attainment and overall degree progression. While the purpose of remedial courses is to prepare learners to succeed in more difficult courses, it can produce the opposite effect, discouraging learners from pursuing more advanced courses or pushing them to drop out.
A December report from the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness (CAPR)—a partnership of MDRC and the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College—identified the benefits of placing students into college-level math and English classes and how it can impact their credit attainment and completion.
“This research finds evidence that colleges should consider increasing the total number of students referred directly to college-level courses, whether by lowering their requirements for direct placement into college-level courses or by implementing other policies with the same effect,” according to the report.
Methodology: Around three-quarters of colleges use multiple measures assessment (MMA) systems to place learners in remedial education, relying on standardized tests and high school GPA, among other factors, according to the CAPR report.
This study evaluates data from 12 community colleges across Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin and 29,999 students to see how effective MMA systems are compared to traditional test-only placement methods on dictating students’ long-term success.
Incoming students who took a placement test were randomly assigned to one of two groups: test-only referral or MMA placement. Researchers collected data on how students would have been placed under both systems to analyze different outcomes and gauge long-term outcomes.
The findings: For most students, there was no material difference in their placement; 81 percent of the math sample and 68 percent of the English sample referred students to the same level of coursework, which researchers classified as “always college level” or “always developmental.”
Around 44 percent of students from the New York sample were “bumped up” into a college-level English course, and 16 percent were bumped up into a college-level math class due to being assigned to the MMA group, whereas the test-only system would have sorted them into developmental education. Seven percent of learners were “bumped down” into developmental ed for English.
In Wisconsin, 15 percent of students in the MMA group were bumped up in English, and 14 percent were bumped up in math placement.
Students who were assigned to the MMA group and were placed into a higher-level course were more likely to have completed a college-level math or English course, compared to their peers in the test-only placement group with similar GPAs and scores.
This bump-up group, across samples, was eight percentage points more likely to pass a college-level course and earned 2.0 credits more on average. These learners were also more likely to earn a degree or transfer to a four-year institution within nine semesters by 1.5 percentage points.
Inversely, students who were recommended by MMA placement to take developmental ed, but not according to the test-only system, were less likely to succeed.
So what? The evidence shows that referring more students into college-level courses is a better predictor of success than the placement system.
Implementing an MMA is a small cost to the institution, around $60 per student, but it can result in students saving money because they take fewer developmental courses over all, and maybe earn more credits entirely.
“Overall, this report concludes that MMA, when it allows more students to be directly placed in college-level coursework, is a cost-effective way to increase student educational achievement,” researchers wrote.
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