Education Week - November 14, 2018 - 7

'Transition' Class Boosts College Credits But Not Learning
Results dim hopes
for new intervention
By Stephen Sawchuk
College remediation is a big, expensive deal.
More than two-thirds of students
in two-year colleges take a remedial class at some point after enrolling, and about 40 percent of those
in four-year courses do, too. The
courses are costly for students who
pay for them, especially since they
don't get credits for doing so. And
finally, advocates fiercely debate
whether the classes do anything
to better prepare students-or
whether they're just a big roadblock
to a degree.
A few years back, Tennessee
began trying out a novel solution
to some of those problems: a transition course in senior year, in which
high school students could master
the math skills colleges require-
and then directly enroll in creditbearing classes, rather than remedial ones.
The idea of transition courses has
since caught on among states eager
to save students-and taxpayers-
cash. Now, the first large-scale study
of Tennessee's initiative finds some
good news for the program but also
raises questions about its underlying purpose. On the one hand, the
study finds that the initiative did
help participating students enroll
directly into college math and to
earn a few more credits compared
with those students who didn't take
the class. But the new course did not
seem to boost students' actual math
knowledge.
In all, the findings led the researchers spearheading the project
to ponder whether higher education's entire approach to college remediation needs a serious rethink.
High school transition classes may
be a good first step, but perhaps remediation needs to begin earlier in
students' high school trajectories or
coupled with a more intensive menu
of services, they concluded.
"Whether it's in school or in college, we need to identify a more effective model of remediation," said
Thomas Kane, the Harvard Graduate School of Education researcher
who co-led the research team. "We
need to commit to piloting and testing different models, perhaps a more
intensive model, perhaps moving remediation earlier in high school."

SAILS math uses a blended education format, in which students
proceed at their own pace through
computer-based modules, including
homework, assignments, and quizzes. Nearly 90 percent of students
enrolled in SAILS completed it by
the end of the 2017-18 school year,
according to the Tennessee Higher
Education Commission. The program's evolution has also paralleled
a decline in the number of entering
community-college students needing
remediation.
The new Harvard-Vanderbilt research matters for several reasons.
First, there is not much research
on what students learn in developmental education. Most studies focus
on those courses' effects on enrollment and completion rates.
Second, transition courses like
SAILS are only now starting to get
a good look from education researchers. The few studies of them so far
find generally small effects, some
positive and some negative, noted
Elisabeth Barnett, a senior research
scholar at the Community College
Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University.
"The transition courses make total
sense. Why wouldn't you want students to graduate ready for college?
But of the research results we've
seen so far, the outcomes haven't
been headline-making," Barnett
said. "There are still a lot more
people doing transition courses than
there were even a few years ago, and

there's a lot of momentum about the
idea of using 12th grade to do this
kind of thing. The question is, how
can we do it well?"
The idea has indeed taken off
among states, as Education Week
reported a few years back. California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey,
New York, Tennessee, and West
Virginia all offer variations on the
theme. It has also spawned efforts
to develop some shared curricula.
The Southern Regional Education
Board has crafted model math and
literacy transition courses for states

the ACT college-entrance test below
19 were recommended to enroll in
SAILS. To make up a sort of natural control group, the researchers
compared them with students who
just passed the ACT threshold, the
next best thing to having a randomassignment study.

More Credits, More Learning?
Finally, for a subset of high school
seniors, the researchers gave a modified version of the ACT math exam
to compare how students enrolled in

Whether it's in school or in college, we need to
identify a more effective model of remediation."
THOMAS KANE
Harvard Graduate School of Education

and districts to adopt.
The Harvard and Vanderbilt team
used several methods to gauge the
effect of SAILS. First, because the
program expanded each year from
2012-13 through 2015-16, the researchers were able to compare outcomes for students in SAILS schools
with those in schools that hadn't
yet implemented it. To do that, they
took advantage of the program's
cutoff score for participation.
Students who received a score on

SAILS did in relation to those who
took some other math course that
year.
In their first year in community
college, participants' enrollment in
a credit-bearing college math class,
as opposed to a remedial course, did
increase by 29 percentage points,
and roughly half those students
passed that course. By their second
year, the students had taken 4.5 additional credits (about a course and
a half) compared with students in

high schools without SAILS.
That said, the increases weren't
enough to change the proportion
of students completing an associate degree or certificate within two
years.
SAILS also improved students' attitudes about math's usefulness and
their preparation in math.
Yet it did not noticeably boost performance on the math test.
A shift in policy might have affected those findings, too. By 2014,
Tennessee had moved to allow college students to take college remediation alongside credit-bearing
courses-what's known as "corequisite classes"-and that effectively undercut some of the appeal
of SAILS.
SAILS has won numerous awards
since its rollout, and it wasn't clear
whether the findings would prompt
changes to the initiative.
"We appreciate the analysis undertaken on the program, and as
we conduct our review of the study,
it's important to remember this was
a targeted solution developed and
implemented for Tennessee, and
SAILS has truly surpassed all expectations," said Mike Krause, the
executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
"The return on investment for our
students has been seismic, saving
both credit hours and tuition dollars by avoiding math remediation."
Funding for the research came from
the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Context of Reform
The study was conducted jointly
by the Center for Education Policy
Research at Harvard and the Peabody College of Education and
Human Development at Vanderbilt
University, in Tennessee.
Since its debut, more than 57,000
students have enrolled in Tennessee's math transition class, called
Seamless Alignment and Integrated
Learning Support, or SAILS. Begun
in 2011 at Chattanooga State Community College, it has since expanded
to high schools throughout the state.
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Education Week - November 14, 2018

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