Remedial Education: Definition, Examples, and Approaches

Remedial education, also known as developmental education, plays a crucial role in addressing academic disparities and ensuring students are adequately prepared for postsecondary success. It encompasses a range of programs, courses, and activities designed to support students who lack the foundational skills necessary for college-level work. This article delves into the definition of remedial education, explores various approaches and examples, and examines its significance in the broader educational landscape.

Defining Remedial Education

Remedial education is any program, course, or activity that is designed specifically for students who have basic deficiencies in reading, written or oral communication, mathematics, study skills, or other skills necessary to do beginning postsecondary work as defined by the institution. Remedial courses reiterate basic skills that students were expected to have mastered before entry into postsecondary education. It is a prescribed educational intervention that is designed to restore an identified practice deficiency of a licensee to conformity with the accepted standards of the profession. Remediation includes, but is not limited to, successful demonstration by the licensee that the learned knowledge and skills have been incorporated into the licensee's practice.

While special education is designed specifically for students with special needs, remedial education can be designed for any students, with or without special needs; the defining trait is simply that they have reached a point of lack of preparedness, regardless of why.

The Need for Remedial Education

The expansion of access to higher education in the mid-1960s, spurred by the Higher Education Act and the Civil Rights Act, brought a more diverse student population to colleges and universities. This influx highlighted the need for systems to support students who were not adequately prepared for college-level work.

Remedial education aims to rectify disparities generated in primary and secondary schooling. It develops the minimum skills deemed necessary for functional participation in the economy and the democracy, and to acquire the prerequisite competencies that are crucial for negotiating college-level coursework.

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Key Components of Remedial Education

Remedial education programs typically focus on:

Basic Skills: Instruction in fundamental skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics.
Study Skills: Development of effective learning strategies and organizational skills.
Test Preparation: Assistance with placement tests like the ACT, SAT, ACCUPLACER, or COMPASS assessments.

Remedial education intends to educate learners in the skills that are required to complete gateway courses and enter and complete a program of study. The bulk of remedial courses focus on advancing underprepared learners' literacy skills (English and literacy) or math skills. However, remedial courses can also be offered for other subjects such as science, computer literacy, or study skills.

Approaches to Remedial Education

Remedial Instruction vs. Compensatory Approaches

Schools use educational strategies to help kids with learning and thinking differences. Remedial instruction targets the foundational skills your child needs to master. This is important to help them make progress with more advanced skills and concepts. Some remedial approaches include breaking tasks down into smaller chunks, reteaching skills, and using a different teaching approach that may be a better fit for the way your child learns. Remedial approaches tend to focus on repetition to help develop specific skills.

Many schools use computers to help provide remedial support. Teachers also work with students in class. Depending on your child’s needs, the school may also recommend a summer program or repeating a grade.

If remedial instruction isn’t helping your child make enough progress, it may be time to talk with the school about compensatory measures. This approach looks for ways to build on your child’s strengths and work around weaknesses.

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For many kids with learning and thinking differences, it’s best to aim for a combo. Remedial instruction will address skills deficits, while compensatory approaches will enable them to reach their full potential.

Accelerated Learning Programs

From developmental education sprang the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP), which is a formal course of study. This program was initially started in part by Peter Adams at the Community College of Baltimore County. This program places a student who has been declared to need further progression in their education to meet college-level requirements to enroll in a first-year composition class where 50% of the students are ALP students and 50% have been placed in first-year composition. It is reported that 74% of students have passed first-year composition as a result of ALP. ALP is reported to be a well-known national program that has served as a template for hundreds of colleges across.

Corequisite Remediation

Corequisite models are when two courses are designed to be taken together in the same semester. This allows learners to enroll in college-level, credit-bearing courses while also enrolling in concurrent courses for just-in-time remediation, skills review, and/or coordinated academic support.

Math Pathways

Designed for community college students pursuing non-technical majors, the new math pathways place a greater priority on preparation in statistics and quantitative reasoning than in the traditional algebra-intensive course sequence. The alternative approaches are growing rapidly in community colleges. That’s in part because of promising early results, showing that learners who attempt the new sequences are three to four times as likely to pass a college-level math course, such as Statistics, as learners who enroll in traditional remedial courses. It’s also because, while two years of algebra courses provide direct preparation for science and engineering majors, applied math courses such as Statistics are more relevant for learners in many other academic fields, including the social sciences.”

Examples of Remedial Education Programs and Initiatives

Special Assistance Program (Victoria, Australia): The development and implementation of the Special Assistance Program in Victorian Primary Schools during the period 1979-1982 constituted the most significant innovation in the provision of special education services to children experiencing learning difficulties and in addressing declining literacy and numeracy standards.
Success NC (North Carolina): In 2012, North Carolina underwent a wide-scale redesign of their remedial education programs. Branded as 'Success NC', the program's Developmental Education Initiative takes steps to redesign math and reading curricula, move students through remedial courses faster and better assess and place students. North Carolina colleges can now incorporate high school grades into their course placement decisions.
Carnegie Math Pathways: Carnegie Math Pathways began more than 10 years ago with the premise to enroll all learners, regardless of their performance on placement exams, directly into college-level math. The initiative has shown that learners can succeed in classrooms that engage them in relevant, meaningful math and that nurture their sense of belonging and confidence in their math abilities. Learners in Carnegie Math Pathways courses succeed at triple the rate of their peers in half the time, and they go on to more college credits and transfer, and graduate at higher rates.
Dana Center Mathematics Pathways: Dana Center on at the University of Texas at Austin draws on more than two decades of research and experience to focus on strategies for improving learner engagement, motivation, persistence, and achievement in K-16 mathematics and science education. It has focused major attention on reforms in mathematics education. A major contribution has been its toolkit to present nationally agreed-upon design principles for implementing corequisite mathematics and tools and resources to make these principles actionable. It supports faculty members, advisors, and administrators in adopting corequisites that ensure college learners, in particular those who are Black, Latinx, Indigenous, first-generation, and from low-income communities, gain access to gateway mathematics in their first year and are provided the supports they need to be successful.

Further Examples:

Single Semester Co-requisite Austin Peay State University Structured Assistance
Community College of Baltimore City’s Accelerated Learning Project
One-Year Course Pathway Carnegie Statway/Quantway Dana Center Mathmatics Pathways
Embedded or Parallel Remediation in Career Technical Programs Tennessee Technical Colleges Washington I-BEST
Accelerated Paths California Acceleration Project
Competency-Based Options Core Skills Mastery Pearson’s Foundations

The Debate Surrounding Remedial Education

While remedial education aims to bridge academic gaps, it has faced criticism. Some argue that it places an additional financial burden on taxpayers, diminishes academic standards, and demoralizes faculty. There are many questions about how this structure both benefits students by increasing their preparation and harms students by increasing the courses required and time needed to complete college.

Estimates on the portion of students in higher education taking remedial courses vary. The likelihood of remedial placement varies among states because of high school preparation, student demographics and state policies for assessing and placing students in remedial courses.

There is an active debate on how remedial courses should be delivered to students. Students who are placed into remedial courses have differing skill levels and needs for support. There is an active debate on whether students that are on the upper end of the skill spectrum may be most successful bypassing remedial coursework and enrolling in college-level courses with additional tutoring. In contrast, students with larger skill deficiencies may require substantial math and English instruction before they can succeed academically.

The Role of Placement Tests

Many students are placed into remedial courses through placement tests such as the ACT, SAT, ACCUPLACER, or COMPASS assessments. Often, each college or university sets its own score thresholds for determining whether a student must enroll in remedial courses. However, some states are moving toward a uniform standard for remedial placement cut scores.

Whether placement tests are the most effective method of placing students is an open debate across the US. Some colleges and states are experimenting with using high school grade point average (GPA) and placement test scores to determine student course referral. Placement test scores are not especially good predictors of course grades in developmental education classes. More importantly, the tests do not have much explanatory power across a range of measures of performance including college GPA, credit accumulation, and success in gatekeeper English and math classes. Using GPA with standardized test scores may also improve the accuracy of remedial placement and limit the likelihood of placing students into additional remedial courses they may not need.

Challenges and Opportunities

Students who are placed into remedial courses face several challenges:

Increased Time to Graduation: Remedial courses often do not count toward graduation requirements, extending the time it takes to complete a degree.
Financial Burden: Additional semesters of remedial education can deplete financial aid resources.
Discouragement: Remedial courses can be discouraging and may lead to students dropping out.

However, there are also opportunities to improve remedial education:

Accelerated Pathways: Speeding up the pace at which students progress through remedial courses.
Contextualized Learning: Providing learning experiences that are relevant to students' interests and career goals.
Modularization and Compression: Breaking down courses into smaller, more manageable modules.

Remedial Education in Europe

While remedial programmes are common in the United States, they are less common in Europe. Nevertheless, several European higher education institutes have started to offer remedial education programmes as well. One reason why European universities are starting to develop remedial courses is the different situation in the two continents. In the United States, a common assumption is that remediation attracts underprepared students of low socioeconomic status. Inadequate academic preparation is no longer a barrier to college access. In contrast, in Europe, a large part of the transitional problems are caused by differences among national secondary educational programmes, which are determined on a national level. Therefore, these students are hindered in effectively starting a bachelor or master programme.

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