Bringing Developmental Education to Scale: Lessons from the Developmental Education Initiative

Abstract

While over half of all community college students are judged to need developmental (or remedial) reading, composition, and/or mathematics classes, these courses — which students are often required to complete before they can enroll in courses that confer credit toward a degree — typically present major roadblocks to student progress. To address this issue, the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) was created in 2009. Fifteen highly diverse community colleges that had been early participants in Achieving the Dream, a national community college reform network, each received a three-year grant of $743,000 to scale up existing interventions or establish new ones that would help students progress through developmental courses more quickly and successfully. The colleges typically identified two or three “focal strategies” — most often, student support services and new instructional strategies — for achieving these goals. This second and final report from the evaluation relies on both qualitative and quantitative data to examine the implementation of these focal strategies