Because challenges are ubiquitous, resilience is essential for success in school and in life. In this article we review research demonstrating the impact of students’ mindsets on their resilience in the face of academic and social challenges. We show that students who believe (or are taught) that intellectual abilities are qualities that can be developed (as opposed to qualities that are fixed) tend to show higher achievement across challenging school transitions and greater course completion rates in challenging math courses. New research also shows that believing (or being taught) that social attributes can be developed can lower adolescents’ aggression and stress in response to peer victimization or exclusion, and result in enhanced school performance. We conclude by discussing why psychological interventions that change students’ mindsets are effective and what educators can do to foster these mindsets and create resilience in educational settings. When students struggle with their schoolwork, what determines whether they give up or embrace the obstacle and work to overcome it? And when students feel excluded or victimized by peers, what determines whether they seek revenge through aggression or seek more productive solutions? Resilience—or whether students respond positively to challenges—is crucial for success in school and in life. Yet what causes it? And what can be done to increase it? In this article we demonstrate the impact of students’ mindsets—or implicit theories about the malleability of human characteristics—on their academic and social resilience (Dweck, 2006; Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995). We show how mindsets can contribute to two of the most important issues currently facing educators: (a) academic underachievement and (b) the impact of peer exclusion and victimization. Each of these problems is of great concern, yet each has been frustratingly difficult to address. For example, many of the large-scale interventions evaluated by the Institute of

Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed

This chapter provides a national context about how students progress in community colleges across the country. It includes data about students who take developmental education courses, how they move through the developmental course sequence, the obstacles they face when completing their intended course of study, and programs and practices that appear to help students meet their goals.

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Challenge and opportunity: rethinking the role and function of developmental education in community college

Many of the democratizing opportunities provided by community colleges are diminished in the eyes of policy makers by inadequate rates of success. In particular, large proportions of students who enter community colleges do not persist for longer than a semester, complete a program, or attain a credential. This review critically examines academic and policy research in search of explanations, emphasizing what is known about challenges stemming from three levels of influence: the macro-level opportunity structure; institutional practices; and the social, economic, and academic attributes students bring to college. It provides examples of how factors operating at each level affect rates of success at key times, including the initial transition to college, the experience of remedial education, and persistence through credit-bearing coursework. The article also discusses potential and ongoing reforms that could increase rates of community college success by addressing one or more areas of influence (the macro, the institutional, or the individual). It is concluded that increasing success in the open-access, public 2-year sector requires reforms directed at multiple levels and cannot be achieved with either student- or institution-focused incentives alone.

Challenges and Opportunities for Improving Community College Student Success

Using a dataset containing nearly 500,000 courses taken by over 40,000 community and technical college students in Washington State, this study examines the performance gap between online and face-to-face courses and how the size of that gap differs across student subgroups and academic subject areas. While all types of students in the study suffered decrements in performance in online courses, those with the strongest declines were males, younger students, Black students, and students with lower grade point averages. Online performance gaps were also wider in some academic subject areas than others. After controlling for individual and peer effects, the social sciences and the applied professions (e.g., business, law, and nursing) showed the strongest online performance gaps.

Performance Gaps Between Online and Face-to-Face Courses: Differences Across Types of Students and Academic Subject Areas

Schools today confront ambitious new societal goals aiming at greater learning for more students. Simultaneously, we are demanding that our educational institutions operate more efficiently. A growing cadre of scholars and policy organizations argue that responding to these challenges requires a fundamental reorganization of the connections among research and practice. This chapter details new ways for scholars and practitioners to engage together in disciplined inquiry organized around specified problems of practice improvement. It describes the social organization of networked communities aimed at systematic learning from practice to improve it. Embedded within the day-to-day work of such improvement communities are multiple cycles of design, engineering, and development (DEED) that generate numerous small tests about what works for whom under different circumstances. We call this improvement research. The chapter details a core set of structuring agents necessary to form such networked improvement communities (NIC). We illustrate these ideas drawing on early design experiences from an emerging NIC seeking to address the extraordinary high failure rates in developmental mathematics in community colleges. These “developmental” courses currently operate as a barrier to opportunity, blocking access to both occupational training certification and transfer to 4-year institutions. We posit that research and practice properly arranged can reframe the opportunity equation.

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Getting Ideas into Action: Building Networked Improvement Communities in Education

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8MW2R7K/download

Referral, enrollment, and completion in developmental education sequences in community colleges

Discrimination: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states: \" No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. \" Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 states: \" No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. \" Therefore , the National Dissemination Center for Career and Technical Education and the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education, like every program or activity receiving financial assistance from the U.S. Department of Education, must be operated in compliance with these laws. Now office, and the CUNY Office of Institutional Research for providing the data used in this report. Use of these data should not be considered an endorsement of the findings by either Florida or CUNY. The authors are also grateful for the financial support of the National Research Center for Career and Technical Education. Dual enrollment programs enable high school students to enroll in college courses and earn college credit. Once limited to high-achieving students, such programs are increasingly seen as a means to support the postsecondary preparation of average-achieving students. Moreover, though dual enrollment programs typically have been reserved for academically-focused students , increasing numbers of career and technical education (CTE) programs are providing such opportunities to their students. Despite the popularity and growth of dual enrollment programs, little is known about their efficacy. This report seeks to answer several questions regarding their effectiveness using rigorous quantitative methods. We examine the impact of dual enrollment participation for students in the State of Florida and in New York City. For both locations, we specifically examine postsecondary outcomes for participating CTE students; in Florida, we also examine the outcomes of dual enrollment participation for all students. We provide evidence that dual enrollment is a useful strategy for encouraging postsecondary success for all students, including those in CTE programs. Dual enrollment programs are collaborative efforts between high schools and colleges in which high school students (usually juniors and seniors) are permitted to enroll in college courses. These programs provide students with a challenging academic experience and the opportunity …

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The Postsecondary Achievement of Participants in Dual Enrollment: "An Analysis of Student Outcomes in Two States".

After being assessed, many students entering community colleges are referred to one or more levels of developmental education. While the need to assist students with weak academic skills is well known, little research has examined student progression through multiple levels of developmental education and into entry-level college courses. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the patterns and determinants of student progression through sequences of developmental education starting from initial referral. Our results indicate that fewer than one half of the students who are referred to remediation actually complete the entire sequence to which they are referred. About 30 percent of students referred to developmental education do not enroll in any remedial course, and only about 60 percent of referred students actually enroll in the remedial course to which they were referred. The results also show that more students exit their developmental sequences because they did not enroll in the first or a subsequent course than because they failed or withdrew from a course in which they were enrolled. We also show that men, older students, African American students, part-time students, and students in vocational programs are less likely to progress through their full remedial sequences.

Referral, Enrollment, and Completion in Developmental Education Sequences in Community Colleges. CCRC Working Paper No. 15.

Developmental education is designed to provide students with weak academic skills the opportunity to strengthen those skills enough to prepare them for college-level coursework The concept is simple enough—students who arrive unprepared for college are provided instruction to bring them up to an adequate level But in practice, developmental education (or “remedial” education, we use these terms interchangeably) is complex and confusing Experts do not agree on the meaning of being “college ready,” and policies governing assessment, placement, pedagogy, staffing, completion, and eligibility for enrollment in college-level, credit-bearing courses vary from state to state, college to college, and program to program The developmental education process is confusing enough simply to describe, yet from the point of view of the student, especially one with very weak academic skills and little previous success in school, it may appear as a bewildering set of unanticipated obstacles involving several assessments, classes in more than one subject area, and sequences of courses requiring three or more semesters of study before the student (often a high school graduate) is judged prepared for college-level work The policy deliberation and especially the research about developmental education give scant attention to this confusion and complexity Discussion typically assumes that the state of being “college ready” is well-defined, and it often elides the distinction between students who need remediation and those who actually enroll in developmental courses What is more, developmental education is often discussed without acknowledgement of the extensive diversity of services that bear that label Any comprehensive understanding of developmental education and any successful strategy to improve its effectiveness cannot be built on such a simplistic view In this Brief, which summarizes a study by the Community College Research Center on patterns of student progression through developmental education, we broaden the discussion by moving beyond consideration of the developmental course and focus attention instead on the developmental sequence In most colleges, students are, upon initial enrollment, assigned to different levels of developmental education on the basis of performance on placement tests Students with greater academic deficiencies are often referred to a sequence of three or more courses designed to prepare them in a stepby-step fashion for the first college-level course in a particular subject area For example, students with the greatest need in developmental math may be expected to enroll in and pass pre-collegiate math or arithmetic, basic algebra, and intermediate algebra in order to prepare them for college-level algebra We define the “sequence” as a process that begins with initial assessment and referral to remediation and ends with completion of the highestlevel developmental course—the course that in principle completes the student’s preparation for college-level studies At times we extend the notion of “sequence” into the first-level college course in the relevant subject area—known as the “gatekeeper” course—since in the end the short-term purpose of remediation is to prepare the student to be successful in that first college-level course In this study we examine the relationship between referral to developmental education and actual enrollment, and we track students as they progress or fail to progress through their referred sequences of remedial courses, analyzing the points at which they exit those sequences We also analyze demographic and institutional characteristics that may be related to student progression in developmental sequences We carry out this analysis using longitudinal data collected as part of the Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count initiative (see wwwachievingthedreamorg) The sample includes data on more than 250,000 students from 57 colleges in seven states This Achieving the Dream sample more closely represents an urban, low-income, and minority student population than do community colleges in the country as a whole Because the sample is not representative of all community college students, we checked our results—when possible—

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Student Progression Through Developmental Sequences in Community Colleges

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Dong Wook Jeong

Papers

Referral, enrollment, and completion in developmental education sequences in community colleges

The Postsecondary Achievement of Participants in Dual Enrollment: "An Analysis of Student Outcomes in Two States".

Referral, Enrollment, and Completion in Developmental Education Sequences in Community Colleges. CCRC Working Paper No. 15.

Student Progression Through Developmental Sequences in Community Colleges

Conducting Research to Answer Your Questions about Dual Enrollment