Evaluating institutional efforts to streamline postsecondary remediation

Large numbers of students who attend college each year are required to enroll in remedial programs aimed at enhancing their weak reading, writing, and/or mathematical skills and helping to prepare them for success in college-level courses. Recently, a host of new course innovations have surfaced that are intended to move students through remediation more efficiently and effectively. In Tennessee, the focus of this research, several colleges have redesigned the way in which they offer remedial courses, including mainstreaming students into college-level courses and making greater use of learning-technology to provide individualized modules tailored to students' specific academic needs. However, little research has been done to estimate the causal effects of these redesigns on student academic outcomes, and evaluate how the impact of the new courses compares to that of "traditional" remediation. Exploiting a statewide cutoff on the placement examination used to assign students to remedial courses, I employ a regression-discontinuity research design to provide causal estimates of the effects of the redesigned courses on the subsequent academic outcomes of students in remediation. Moreover, using data on student outcomes prior to the course redesign, I also test whether the redesigned remedial programs are more effective in preparing students for success in postsecondary education than were the remedial programs they replaced. The effects of enrollment in developmental mathematics are positive and statistically significant on early student persistence, as well as on the number of credits attempted but not completed in the first semester. However, these effects do not persist over time, as I find no statistically significant differences between groups after two years. Furthermore, students exposed to redesigned developmental math courses had more positive outcomes than their peers in non-redesign institutions during the same period and also when compared to students exposed to the previous version of traditional remediation within their institution in prior years. The results of my analysis provide insight into the extent to which the particular instruction and delivery methods of remedial courses affect subsequent student academic outcomes, thus informing administrators and policymakers as to how to best help underprepared students.