MDRC’s recent report from its Opening Doors Demonstration, A Good Start: Two-Year Effects of a Freshmen Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College, has been featured in two prominent education trade periodicals, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed.

Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Remedial education remains a struggle for many community colleges, which are expected to help students who received inadequate high school educations get ready for college-level work. Legislators hate paying for remedial education; community colleges hate being defined by remedial education; students hate being unable to get into the college-level courses that attracted them to higher education in the first place.

A study being released today by MDRC, a research organization, suggests that “learning communities” — in which students take several courses together as a cohort — have the potential to significantly improve students’ performance in remedial courses and ability to advance to college-level work….

….The study is particularly significant in that Kingsborough Community College, a part of the City University of New York where the work took place, helped the researchers conduct a true randomized trial — in which students were assigned either to the learning community or a control group. Much education research takes place either after a college has made a change (so there is no control group) or with volunteer pilot projects (in which issues of self-selection may raise doubts about the outcome).

The program at Kingsborough is part of the Opening Doors demonstration, which MDRC is using at six community colleges to test strategies for helping low-income students succeed. "The major take-away for me was something we believe: Learning communities do make a difference with students moving through developmental course work and getting academic credit," said Regina S. Peruggi, Kingsborough's president.