Accelerating College Remediation: Examining the Effects of Math Course Redesign on Student Academic Success

Abstract

ABSTRACT American colleges are redesigning the ways in which they offer remedial courses, including mainstreaming students into college-level courses and making greater use of learning-technology to tailor the curriculum to students’ specific academic needs. Exploiting a statewide cutoff on a remediation placement exam along with data on student outcomes prior to and after a course redesign effort in Tennessee, I estimate the effects of three different institutional redesign efforts (acceleration, modularization, and corequisite math remediation) on students’ short, moderate, and long-term academic success. I find that students exposed to accelerated and corequisite developmental math courses had more positive outcomes than their peers exposed to traditional developmental math courses, but those in modularized courses did not. The magnitude of the estimated effect differs by the type of math redesign and the level of academic need of the students. These results provide insight into the extent to which the particular instruction and delivery methods of developmental courses affect performance in college-level math, credit accumulation, and persistence to degree.