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Author
  Mary Visher
Senior Associate
 
     
    Breaking New Ground
An Impact Study of Career-Focused Learning Communities at Kingsborough Community College
    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.
 
    Learning Communities for Students in Developmental Reading
An Impact Study at Hillsborough Community College
    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.
 
    Scaling Up Learning Communities
The Experience of Six Community Colleges
    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.
 
    Case Studies of Three Community Colleges
The Policy and Practice of Assessing and Placing Students in Developmental Education Courses
Working Paper
    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.
 
    Guiding Developmental Math Students to Campus Services
An Impact Evaluation of the Beacon Program at South Texas College
    2010. Mary G. Visher, Kristin F. Butcher, and Oscar S. Cerna, with Dan Cullinan and Emily Schneider.

Created as part of the national Achieving the Dream initiative, a “light touch” intervention targeting students enrolled in lower-level math courses increased the number of students using campus tutoring and academic services. While the program has not improved math class pass rates or persistence in college overall, it has had positive effects for part-time and developmental students.
 
    The Learning Communities Demonstration
Rationale, Sites, and Research Design
Working Paper
    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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