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Abstract Developmental education (dev-ed) aims to help students acquire knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in college-level coursework. The traditional prerequisite approach to postsecondary dev-ed—where students take remedial courses that do not count toward a credential—appears to stymie progress toward a degree. At community colleges across the country, most students require remediation in math, creating a barrier to college-level credits under the traditional approach. Corequisite coursework is a structural reform that places students directly into a college-level course in the same term they receive dev-ed support. Using administrative data from Texas community colleges and a regression discontinuity design, we examine whether corequisite math improves student success compared with traditional prerequisite dev-ed. We find that corequisite math quickly improves student completion of math requirements without any obvious drawbacks, but students in corequisite math were not substantially closer to degree completion than their peers in traditional dev-ed after 3 years.
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Constructing Corequisites: How Community Colleges Structure Corequisite Math Coursework and the Implications for Student Success
States and broad-access colleges are rapidly scaling corequisite coursework—a model where students concurrently enroll in college-level and developmental coursework—in response to dismal completion rates in traditional “developmental” sequences. At community colleges, evidence suggests that corequisite reforms can dramatically improve students’ completion of required college-level courses, but colleges often implement new programing and sequences with limited information. We analyzed administrative data from Texas community colleges implementing a statewide corequisite mandate. Our results illustrate (a) how colleges structured corequisite courses in response to the statewide mandate and (b) how corequisite coursework characteristics predicted student outcomes. Our results suggest that some corequisite coursework elements—including mixed-ability college-level classes, higher credits for the developmental education (dev-ed) corequisite support course, and using the same instructor across both the college-level and dev-ed course—improve students’ probability of passing college-level math, though these course design elements do not appear to predict long-term outcomes like persistence in college.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1856720
- PAR ID:
- 10353276
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- AERA Open
- Volume:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2332-8584
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 233285842210866
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584221086664
