Developmental education, in which college students deemed unprepared for college-level coursework enroll in non-credit-bearing courses, is widespread in American higher education. This study evaluates the effect of mobile app courseware on the college outcomes of developmental education students. We used a research design that randomly assigned course sections to receive access to the apps or not. The results show that access to the apps significantly improved student performance in developmental education outcomes and marginally improved medium-term college persistence and performance but did not affect credential attainment in the study timeframe. Despite a number of barriers to implementation, the results suggest the intervention has the potential to improve the short-term outcomes of developmental education students in addition to being low-cost and scalable.

在美国高等教育中，发展性教育很普遍，在这种发展性教育中，认为没有为大学水平的课程做准备的大学生可以选择不计学分的课程。这项研究评估了移动应用课件对发展型教育学生大学成绩的影响。我们使用了一项研究设计，该研究设计随机分配了课程部分以获取对应用程序的访问与否。结果表明，使用这些应用程序可以显着改善学生在发展教育成果中的表现，并可以稍微改善中期大学的坚持和绩效，但不会影响研究时间范围内的证书获得程度。尽管实施过程中存在许多障碍，