Like Ranee Cervania, I am responding to Tom's comment:  "A huge majority of GED students end up in college developmental courses from which they never emerge."

At the Community College Baltimore County, we have been concerned for some years about the low success rates for students placed in our developmental writing course.  A study we conducted in 1993 showed that only 26% of students starting in our developmental writing course ever passed ENG 101.  Resolving to improve this statistic, in 2007 we began offering a pilot alternative to developmental writing: the Accelerated Learning Project or ALP.

Students who are placed in developmental writing and who volunteer for ALP are allowed to register for designated sections of ENG 101.  Each of these sections comprises 12 students placed in ENG 101 and 8 ALP students.  The same 8 ALP students, during the following class period, meet with the same instructor in what we refer to as a companion course.  Here they discuss what is happening in ENG 101, work on short writing assignments related to the longer papers they are writing in ENG 101, talk about ideas for papers, work on grammar problems, and work on revising their writing.  In addition to these academic topics, in the companion course we also talk about problems they may be having outside of school and about successful behaviors in college.

In the first three semesters, we have offered 20 sections of ALP involving 160 students.  The results have been spectacular.  The success rate in ENG 101 for ALP students has consistently been greater than 56%.  And we now have data on a handful (29) students who passed ENG 101 and attempted the next course in the sequence, ENG 102.  Of the original group of students who attempted ALP in 2007-8 (74 students), 26% (19) have passed ENG 102.  For the corresponding group who took our traditional developmental writing course, only 10% have passed ENG 102.  These latest data are very encouraging because they indicate that the positive effect of ALP may extend longer than just one semester.

We are studying the ALP program extensively: we plan to follow the students in the program for four years to see whether the positive effects follow them to degree completion and/or transfer.  But we are also conducting extensive surveys and focus groups to determine exactly what it is about ALP that produces these results.  That data won't be available for a couple of years, but preliminarily, we think at least some of the following are the major causes of the positive results:

•	Being allowed to take ENG 101 increases student confidence.
•	Being allowed to take ENG 101 reduces the negative attitude caused by not receiving credit for the developmental course.
•	Being integrated into college-level ENG 101 increases students' sense that they are part of the college.
•	Taking ENG 101 and the companion course in a cohort of 8 students and the same instructor increases affiliation among the students and between the students and the instructor.
•	Taking ENG 101 with students whose writing ability placed them in ENG 101 helps ALP students improve their writing and their student skills.
•	Students experience their instructors more as “coaches” whose primarily role is to help them succeed than as “judges” who stand in the way of their succeeding.
•	Students in ALP receive increased individual attention and instruction tailored to their individual needs.
•	Instruction in grammar, punctuation is more effective in the small ALP sections.	
•	ALP decreases student classroom behaviors that impede success.
•	Students receive assistance with such non-academic problems as financial, medical, family, legal, transportation, or difficulties at work and, therefore, are less likely to drop out during the semester.
•	Students in ALP become more motivated to learn grammar, punctuation, and usage.
•	The ENG 101 class provides a context in which students can apply what they are learning in ENG 052.

Details are available at our web site: http://faculty.ccbcmd.edu/~padams/ALP/indexa.html

We are eager to locate other schools that would be interested in adopting ALP and would be happy to provide assistance in doing so.  Contact me at the email below.


Peter Adams | Professor of English
Community College Baltimore County
410•840•1513 | padams2 at ccbcmd.edu

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