Placement and Telemarketing for Developmental Mathematics

Once upon a time, my college had optional placement test results … students could enroll for courses above the level indicated by the placement test. Since the test results were voluntary, students could choose to comply or to rebel relative to our recommendations. One of the factors in this choice was the peer reviews they heard about the developmental course in question; part of our rationale to help them ‘make the right choice’ was the evidence we had about how effective that course was in preparing students for the next course.

Like most institutions, those days are gone; because of ‘best practice reports’ (and our own judgment), we now have mandatory placement test results. Like many other colleges, students at my college MUST comply — regardless of peer reviews of our courses, and regardless of our own evidence.

A recent report from our friends at the Community College Research Center raises even broader questions about the validity of the common placement tests; the report is called “Assessing Developmental Assessment in Community Colleges” … see . This report shares the results of several research studies on placement tests and placement of students, and should be required reading for policy makers at the local, state, and national levels. A basic point is made: For a placement (assessment) system to be valid, the resulting developmental course work should be effective at leveling the playing field. This remains as an open question, overall, for developmental mathematics.

So, I’ve been thinking about this report and what we have been doing. And, I wonder … in commercial enterprises, companies depend upon peer reviews for new business; when that is not enough, they consider things like telemarketing. How successful would we be if we had to use telemarketing to bring students in to our developmental math classes? Could we draw anywhere near the same level of business if we needed to depend on students making a deliberate choice to take our classes as an investment on doing better in the future?

I worry that the vast majority of our students believe that their developmental math work is important only because they have to get a passing grade in order to move on to the next level. I worry even more that … because we have such a strong demand for our courses … REGARDLESS of quality or benefits … we do not put our best content into our courses, nor our best teachers into developmental math classrooms, that our books are less than inspiring, and that we miss opportunities to engage in basic improvement processes.

Maybe it would be good for us to face a possible ‘non-automatic’ nature of students who could opt out of our courses; perhaps we have become so accustomed to guaranteed demand that we do not see opportunities.

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2 Comments

• 

  By John, May 11, 2011 @ 10:38 pm

  Came here from the community college spotlight, which picked up your El Paso related blog item – great stuff – very exciting to seem someone talking about these issues.

  I’ve seen Bailey speak a couple of times on assessment now (as well as a few other people) and he couldn’t be more pessimistic about mandatory placement based on assessment as a best practice – the lack of regression discontinuities (or even reverse discontinuities) at the cut scores just don’t support the use of these measures as placement tests the way they’ve been marketed (though they may remain useful as indicators of vulnerability to failure INDEPENDENT of placement level).

  Incidentally, given some of your other posts and presentations and your top of page links, you might be interested in NIkki Edgescombe’s piece at CCRC on acceleration models in basic skills (the contextualized work and some of the statistic pathways look very promising – CCRC has some other work on contextualized basic skills as well): http://ccrc.tc.columbia.edu/Publication.asp?UID=867

  You might also look into Myra Snell’s work at Los Medanos where she’s had remarkable intitial success with her pre-stats program (covered briefly in Edgescombe’s paper). You can find some details here: http://www.rpgroup.org/sites/default/files/Hern%20Exponential%20Attrition.pdf

  and here:
  http://3csn.org/developmental-sequences/

  Also, the Community College League of California’s Commission on the Future has a webinar coming up on Development English and Math on May 20, details here: http://www.ccleague.org/cotfwebinars or here:
  http://www.box.net/shared/coftv80nc9

  Cheers!

• 

  By Jack Rotman, May 12, 2011 @ 4:52 pm

  John: Thanks for the note; Myra Snell is intimately involved with ‘Statway’, which I am also involved with. You are right … her work is remarkable. I’ll take a look at the CC/CA webinar. I’ve read about the contextualized work, and will keep an eye on it.
  Jack

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