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Learning Communities Demonstration |
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Featured Publication
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Learning Communities for Students in Developmental English
Impact Studies at Merced College and The Community College of Baltimore County
Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2012. Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran, and Phoebe Richman with Amanda Grossman.
Two colleges implemented semester-long learning communities linking developmental English with a range of other courses. At Merced, learning communities students earned more developmental English credits and passed more English courses than a control group. At CCBC, there were no meaningful impacts on students’ credit attempts or progress. Neither college’s program had an impact on persistence or on cumulative credits earned.
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All Learning Communities Demonstration Publications
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Learning Communities for Students in Developmental English
Impact Studies at Merced College and The Community College of Baltimore County
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2012. Evan Weissman, Dan Cullinan, Oscar Cerna, Stephanie Safran, and Phoebe Richman with Amanda Grossman.
Two colleges implemented semester-long learning communities linking developmental English with a range of other courses. At Merced, learning communities students earned more developmental English credits and passed more English courses than a control group. At CCBC, there were no meaningful impacts on students’ credit attempts or progress. Neither college’s program had an impact on persistence or on cumulative credits earned.
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Breaking New Ground
An Impact Study of Career-Focused Learning Communities at Kingsborough Community College
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2011. Mary G. Visher and Jedediah Teres, with Phoebe Richman.
Students took two courses in their major and one on careers associated with their major. Active, collaborative, and interdisciplinary learning was emphasized. No meaningful impacts on educational outcomes were found for the full sample, but recent transfer students saw a modest positive impact on credits earned during the program semester.
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Learning Communities for Students in Developmental Math
Impact Studies at Queensborough and Houston Community Colleges
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2011. Evan Weissman, Kristin F. Butcher, Emily Schneider, Jedediah Teres, Herbert Collado, and David Greenberg with Rashida Welbeck.
Learning communities, which co-enroll small groups of students into linked courses, are a popular strategy for helping developmental students at community colleges succeed. This report examines the impacts of one-semester learning communities for developmental math students at Queensborough Community College and Houston Community College. At both colleges, students in learning communities attempted and passed their developmental math class at higher rates than students in a control group. However, this impact generally did not translate into increased cumulative progress in math by the end of two or three semesters.
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Learning Communities for Students in Developmental Reading
An Impact Study at Hillsborough Community College
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2010. Michael J. Weiss, Mary G. Visher, and Heather Wathington with Jed Teres and Emily Schneider.
A random assignment study of learning communities that linked a developmental reading course and a “college success” course finds that faculty collaboration and curricular integration increased over time. Overall, the program had no impact on students’ academic success, but evidence suggests that it had some positive effects for the last cohort of students in the study.
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Scaling Up Learning Communities
The Experience of Six Community Colleges
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2010. Mary Visher, Emily Schneider, Heather Wathington, and Herbert Collado.
Learning communities, which enroll groups of students together in coordinated classes, are increasingly being used to help developmental-level students succeed. This report on the Learning Communities Demonstration, a large-scale, random assignment evaluation, describes the strategies that six community colleges used and the challenges they faced in scaling up their programs.
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Case Studies of Three Community Colleges
The Policy and Practice of Assessing and Placing Students in Developmental Education Courses
Working Paper
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2010. Stephanie Safran and Mary G. Visher
This paper reports on case studies conducted at three community colleges to learn about how the colleges assess students for placement in developmental education courses. The case studies identify several problems and challenges, including lack of consensus about the standard for college-level work, the high-stakes nature of the assessments, and the minimal relationship between assessment for placement and diagnosis for instruction.
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The Learning Communities Demonstration
Rationale, Sites, and Research Design
Working Paper
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Published with the National Center for Postsecondary Research
2008. Mary G. Visher, Heather Wathington, Lashawn Richburg-Hayes, and Emily Schneider,with Oscar Cerna, Christine Sansone, and Michelle Ware.
Launched in 2007 by MDRC and the National Center for Postsecondary Research, the Learning Communities Demonstration is testing models of this promising approach in six community colleges in five states. This report describes the research design, including information about the colleges and their models, the random assignment process, data sources, analysis plans, and reporting schedule.
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Learning Communities and Student Success in Postsecondary Education
A Background Paper
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2005. Derek V. Price with Malisa Lee.
Interest in learning communities at colleges and universities is growing, as is early evidence of their impact on student success. This paper reviews the history, theory, and research on learning communities, describes how they operate, and proposes a multicollege demonstration project to build more conclusive evidence of their effectiveness.
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