ABSTRACT

American colleges are redesigning the ways in which they offer remedial courses, including mainstreaming students into college-level courses and making greater use of learning-technology to tailor the curriculum to students’ specific academic needs. Exploiting a statewide cutoff on a remediation placement exam along with data on student outcomes prior to and after a course redesign effort in Tennessee, I estimate the effects of three different institutional redesign efforts (acceleration, modularization, and corequisite math remediation) on students’ short, moderate, and long-term academic success. I find that students exposed to accelerated and corequisite developmental math courses had more positive outcomes than their peers exposed to traditional developmental math courses, but those in modularized courses did not. The magnitude of the estimated effect differs by the type of math redesign and the level of academic need of the students. These results provide insight into the extent to which the particular instruction and delivery methods of developmental courses affect performance in college-level math, credit accumulation, and persistence to degree.

摘要

美国大学正在重新设计他们提供补习课程的方式，包括将学生纳入大学水平课程的主流，并更多地利用学习技术来根据学生的特定学术需求定制课程。利用全州范围内的补习分班考试截止日期以及田纳西州重新设计课程前后学生成绩的数据，我估计了三种不同的机构重新设计工作（加速、模块化和并存数学补习）对学生短期成绩的影响，中等和长期的学业成功。我发现接触加速和并存的发展数学课程的学生比接触传统发展数学课程的同龄人有更多的积极成果，但那些参加模块化课程的学生却没有。估计效果的大小因数学重新设计的类型和学生的学术需求水平而异。这些结果让我们深入了解发展课程的特定教学和交付方法在多大程度上影响大学水平的数学、学分积累和学位的持久性。