Learning from the Ground Up (Policy Brief): Developmental Education Reform at Florida College System Institutions

A Pedagogy of Preparation: Helping Underprepared Students Succeed in College-Level Coursework in Community Colleges

“…Professional development on promising practices for working with underprepared students was also prevalent at the institution level. Indeed, a few institutions in the FCS required that faculty complete in-house professional development credits to qualify for and maintain full-time instructor status (Hu et al, 2015).…”

“…This "collaborative advantage," a term coined by Kanter (1994), depends heavily on well-managed relationships. Campus collaboration was not without challenges following SB1720, however, because staff members in different roles oftentimes held different perspectives and had different overriding interests in terms of the larger organization (Hu et al, 2015).…”

Scaffolding Mathematics Remediation for Academically At-Risk Students Following Developmental Education Reform in Florida

“…Florida Senate Bill 1720 (SB 1720) is part of a larger national developmental education reform movement, whose aim is to improve outcomes for academically underprepared students by increasing the quality of remediation and accelerating the DE course sequence. Introduced in 2013, SB 1720 was fully implemented in fall 2014 (Hu et al, 2015 ). The rationale behind SB 1720 was to help underprepared students reach and succeed in college-level courses more quickly, either through bypassing DE altogether or through instructional strategies designed to propel students more quickly to credit-bearing college courses.…”

“…The rationale behind SB 1720 was to help underprepared students reach and succeed in college-level courses more quickly, either through bypassing DE altogether or through instructional strategies designed to propel students more quickly to credit-bearing college courses. For students who entered into ninth grade at a public high school in Florida in the 2003–2004 academic year and subsequently graduated or who were active duty military, the legislation made optional the use of placement tests to assign students into DE and required these “exempt” students to be given the choice to bypass DE entirely (Hu et al, 2015 ).…”

“…Under SB 1720, colleges were required to design new DE curricula inclusive of the modularized, contextualized, compressed, and corequisite course options (or modalities). Modularized instruction, one of the most widely adopted new instructional strategies in developmental math (Hu et al, 2015 ), involves breaking course components into smaller instructional units (i.e., typically computerized modules) so that students can focus on the specific set of skills in which they are deficient. Contextualized instruction is related to “meta-majors” or “a collection of programs of study or academic discipline groupings that share common foundational skills” (Senate Bill 1720 [SB 1720], 2013 , p.28), yet were infrequently implemented across the FCS institutions (Hu et al, 2015 ).…”