Learning Communities for Freshmen Help Community College Students Succeed in Developmental English

(New York) — One of the greatest challenges facing higher education today is how to meet the needs of students who lack basic reading, writing, and math skills. Nationally, 29 percent of incoming freshmen enroll in at least one developmental (or remedial) class; within community colleges, the figure is over 60 percent. An increasingly popular strategy is to place these students into “learning communities” where they take remedial courses linked with other college courses. The theory is that learning communities make basic skills instruction more meaningful and relevant and provide students with more intensive support from faculty and peers.

A new study from MDRC of a one-semester learning community for freshmen at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn, NY, offers the first experimental evidence about an intervention that helps students make a successful transition to college and move more quickly through developmental English requirements. For example, the program increased by 13 percent the proportion of students who passed reading and writing assessment tests in their first semester. Passing the tests is a requirement for graduation or transfer to a four-year university in New York. Students in the program also attempted and passed more courses and earned more credits in their first semester than students in a control group.

Kingsborough is a large, urban college with a diverse student population that includes many immigrants. Kingsborough’s program placed freshmen in groups of up to 25 that took three classes together during their first semester: an English class, usually at the developmental level; an academic course, such as health or psychology; and a one-credit orientation course. The program also provided enhanced counseling and tutoring and a textbook voucher.

One year after entering the program, students in the learning communities reported that they felt more engaged with their coursework, instructors, and fellow students and had a stronger sense of belonging, compared with control group students.

The report, A Good Start: Two-Year Effects of a Freshmen Learning Community Program at Kingsborough Community College, also examines students’ persistence in school. While there were no effects on semester-to-semester retention early on, there was evidence that students who had participated in the program were somewhat more likely to be enrolled in college after two years than students who had not. Researchers plan to do more follow-up to see if this trend continues.

As a result of these promising findings, Kingsborough has expanded its learning communities program, with the goal of serving 80 percent of incoming freshmen by 2010. Currently, the program reaches about 65 percent of incoming freshmen.

“The Opening Doors learning communities for freshmen have been very rewarding for both students and faculty at Kingsborough,” said Regina Peruggi, President of Kingsborough Community College. “We look forward to using the results of this study to further improve the operation of the learning communities on our campus.”

The study at Kingsborough is part of MDRC’s Opening Doors demonstration, a project undertaken in collaboration with the MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Network on the Transition to Adulthood that is testing interventions at six community colleges designed to help low-income students stay in school and succeed. Opening Doors is the first large-scale study of community college programs to use a random assignment design, the “gold standard” of program evaluation. Selected findings about the Kingsborough learning communities also appear in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.

“These important findings from Kingsborough offer real evidence that learning communities can help new students get off to a good start in community college,” said Sue Scrivener, lead author of the report. “The next steps are more follow-up of the Kingsborough students to see whether they are more likely to graduate, as well as new research on other models of learning communities.”

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education, MDRC and the National Center for Postsecondary Research have launched a national demonstration of various learning community models.

To set up an interview with an expert from MDRC, contact John Hutchins, (212) 340-8604 or john.hutchins@mdrc.org. To interview representatives of Kingsborough Community College, contact Ruby Ryles, (718) 368-5543, ruby.ryles@kbcc.cuny.edu.

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Headquartered in New York City, with a regional office in Oakland, CA, MDRC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization with nearly 35 years of experience designing and evaluating education and social policy initiatives.