West Virginia Developmental Education Summit

1. West Virginia Developmental Education Summit Stonewall Jackson Resort June 5, 2013

2. Overview • Housekeeping • Overview of Conference • How did we get here? • How are we doing? • Where are we going?

3. How did we get here?

4. The Challenge • Approximately 45% of all first-time freshmen in West Virginia require remediation. • Developmental education students have graduation rates that are roughly half that of their peers. • Developmental education acts as a barrier to the middle class for thousands of students every year.

5. Student Voices • T: I decided to go to college because of the dead end jobs. There’s nothing without a college education, you can’t get anything. • J: I have two kids. I’ve been out of school for four years now and I figured a minimum wage job is not going to get me where I need to be in life. • D: I chose XX because it’s economical and it’s close to home. And I came back – because I started this when I was young and had children and build my house and doing all that stuff and got over-whelming. So I started years ago and I came back to finish what I started.

6. First Steps • Reviewed System Level Data • Identified the Problem • Created a Developmental Education Task Force • Researched best practices • Developed common learner outcomes • Reviewed policy • Applied for and received $1 million grant from Complete College America

7. Strategies for Improvement • Focus on faculty • Provide professional development and faculty workshops for instructors. • Encourage faculty to share what is working face-to-face and on-line. • Award institutional sub-grants • Develop lasting resources • Developed wvdeved.com as a resource for faculty and administrators to gather and share information.

8. Target • 70 percent of all developmental education students will go on to successfully complete a college gateway course within their first year. • Eliminate the graduation gap between developmental and non-developmental education students. • Increase the number of certificate and degree holders in the state by 20,000 by 2018.

9. How are we doing?

10. First-Time Freshmen, 2012-13

11. First-Time Freshmen, 2012-13

14. Course Format Passage Rates *This indicates students who have passed both developmental and college-level coursework. All other percentage points are indicative of students who passed only a developmental course.

15. Redesigned Courses • Modular Math • ALP English • Fast Track/Stacked Courses

16. Modular Math- Definition • A competency based, self-paced mathematics course. These courses are typically taught in a computer lab with faculty present to answer questions. They often contain an online component. Ideally, students pretest for each competency and are required to take only those modules in which they demonstrate need.

17. Modular Math- Institutions • Bluefield State College • Bridgemont Community and Technical College • Fairmont State University • Mountwest Community and Technical College • Pierpont Community and Technical College • WV Northern Community and Technical College • WVU at Parkersburg

18. Modular Math- Quotes • I was rather surprised going through the modules at how well I was able to handle working with polynomials as well as scientific notations. By the time the modules had led me to the polynomials, I had a pretty good grasp on where I was at and what procedures I needed to follow as far as taking them and dividing or multiplying or adding or subtracting. The scientific notations – I don't think that I even watched any of the tutorial videos. It just seemed like it all fell right into place for me.

19. Modular Math- Quotes • I think it's been a great help. I could study at my pace and my time. There was a lot of tutorials through the modules that helped to – if you got stumped on a problem you could go and watch a video that would break down a similar problem to give you a little bit of help to be able to learn the process and what you needed to do to be able to figure the problem or the equation.

20. Modular Math- Quotes • I didn’t know it would be online, I figured that we would have a professor teaching, but the way they have it set up if you watch the videos and take your notes then you’ll understand what’s going on, but if you just click on there and don’t actually watch the videos, you’re lost. And that’s what a whole lot of students are doing.

21. ALP- Definition • The ALP model places students who would traditionally be placed into developmental English or math into a gateway college-level course alongside students who are deemed college ready. Those students are then required to take an additional supplemental course.

22. ALP- Institutions • Blue Ridge Community and Technical College • Bridgemont Community and Technical College • Fairmont State University • Kanawha Valley Community and Technical College • Mountwest Community and Technical College • Pierpont Community and Technical College • Southern WV Community and Technical College • WV Northern Community and Technical College

23. ALP- Quotes • I like it. I think it’s helped me a lot because I’m ahead of the other students in the comp class. This English now is – I mean we’re not focusing just on English 90, we’re – he’s helping us with our comp papers, or clusters, our outlines, whatever we need help with before we get to that class. And it puts me ahead because I know when I’m going into class, all right, we’re going to be over this, he talked about this in the previous class. I think it’s a good idea. I think more students should have got involved in this instead of just taking English 90. And they’re going to be lost when they come into composition because it’s a – you’re just supposed to know what you do in comp.

24. ALP- Quotes • Yeah, I thought it was going to be more like a – like a, I mean, an intensive like tutoring thing. Like, you’re in 101 and you’re going to go over the subject but then you’re going to come to this class and they’re going to go more in depth with it to help you understand it better. That’s the way I thought it was going to be. Interviewer: And it’s not like that? No, it’s like two separate classes. And sometimes like, you’ll do this thing in 101 and then you’ll come back to it a couple weeks later and do it in 090. And it’s like, why didn’t we do this first?

25. Fast Track/Stacked Courses- Definition • This format consists of two courses being taught consecutively in the same semester. Typically, each course runs for 8 weeks. This format can combine either two developmental courses into one semester or one developmental and one college-level course into a single semester.

26. Fast Track/Stacked Courses- Institutions • Blue Ridge Community and Technical College • Bridgemont Community and Technical College • Kanawha Valley Community and Technical College • Mountwest Community and Technical College • Southern WV Community and Technical College • WV Northern Community and Technical College

27. Fast Track/Stacked Courses- Quotes • I mean it’s – you have to remember a lot. But you don’t have to remember it for as long – as far as without putting it in practical use. Whereas, in traditional foundations course, I would assume that you learn all the basics. Then the next quarter, the whole next year and the next semester you have to flip back around and apply them. But you have to remember everything. So instead of remembering and applying, you’re actually remembering and applying them like that. It’s not like – there’s no waiting in between. So it pertains to what you’re doing, so it’s useful. Then, as I stated before, once you do something a certain way so many times, it just becomes second nature.

28. Fast Track/Stacked Courses- Quotes • Renee: So if you – God forbid you miss a week, because if you miss a week, you’re never catching up. John: I missed last week. I don’t think I’m gonna do this – pass this essay this time.

29. Where are we going?

30. What can we do now that we couldn’t imagine a year or even a semester ago?

31. Advising • Somebody was doing my schedule for me, one of the people – She said that – she wasn’t even helping me that well. She was just – there was a lot of people there, so I guess she was just trying to hurry up, but she was like, “Oh, there’s 065, that’s the one. Click it.” And I was just like all right. And then come to find out it’s accelerated class four days a week, eleven to twelve. I’m so tired. • I'd say the only thing would be if, when the students go to schedule it – it would've been nice to know ahead of time that it was a self paced class. I didn't have any issues with it, but it would've been nice to know ahead of time. It wouldn't be an instructor taught class, it would've been all self paced. That would've been helpful for other people that can't do that as well on their own. • I’m taking English. Not supposed to, but the person that was doing my schedule messed it up so I took it anyways. I’m struggling so – but it was good.

32. Advising • When I went in to get my – do my schedule for the fall, for coming in the fall, he just – he looked through my thing and said you need English 90. He goes, but we got this program with composition, he goes, and you can get it all done at once. ... And I was nervous when I heard composition grades. And I was like well if I gotta get it done let’s do it. Here I am. • You should’ve had it – we should’ve had some kind of advisor explains to us exactly what an accelerated course was and what it entailed instead of – ...Instead of, “You need this. Well, good luck. We’ll see you later.” And then, “Oh, I have to do this, this and this.” ...There should be some kind of explanation.

33. Advising • I was advised like it was a fast track would help you like to get your basics, everything was quicker. So that’s what I done. • She took a whole day – a whole class period of an accelerated class to get everyone straightened out in the right class. So not only were we – we had mountains on top of mountains of work that we had no clue about, that we also was cheated out of a whole solid week of learning to actually do the – all the work that was applied. So I think that whoever did that – whether it be the college or whoever did that – they dropped the ball on that one for sure.

34. The Role of the Instructor • The only thing I don’t like about his teaching is you will write something and we think we do so good on it, and then he’ll stand up in front of the class and say everything bad about what we did instead of just giving it to us and saying it on the side: “You need to fix this.” Instead he says, “Oh, this person put this. This just makes you look stupid.” He doesn’t necessarily use those words. • It’s like the second class when he gave me a test, I started writing notes more. So it’s like we’re copying what’s on the book onto a paper and then copying that onto the quiz. So he made fun of me on 101 last time because he was like, “oh, it took you two quizzes to get this score this time.” And it’s like, really?

35. The Role of the Instructor • You can – like when you’re in the room, you can just tell she wants us to learn and stuff. She wants us to be able to do this stuff because she don’t want us to go out and go into English 101 and failing out and making her look bad and us look bad and everybody else look bad. ... She actually talks and engages with us. • He always gives us, before class starts, a paper. It’s got cluster, like different stuff we can check off that we need help with for essays. And then he goes over and he asks us individually, all right, well what are you having trouble with withyour? I think that’s great because if I don’t understand nothing I can get a better idea before I go to comp, hey, well I don’t know how to make – I don’t know how I’m going to do this cluster because it’s different from the other cluster I had to do in the narrative and that. And it just he’s a good teacher I think. I mean he helps me out a lot. And it helps when you attend the class, too.

36. The Role of the Instructor • It helps to have a professor that actually cares. I mean, she really – she really – in my opinion, I feel like she really truly – like genuinely cares about us actually learning the material. • The most challenging thing for me is probably she wants us to be real in our writing, like be honest. And that’s hard for me like to put it into words, but she does help me a lot with it. Like my organizational skills aren’t very good with my writing.

37. The Next Two Days • Sharing Ideas • Frank Discussion • Strategies for Improvement • Areas of Need