This practitioner packet summarizes CCRC findings on online course outcomes, and presents insights and recommendations for administrators and instructors seeking to improve online student performance.

This packet provides tools for community college practitioners implementing developmental reforms. It includes a research overview, case studies, FAQs about CCRC research on remedial placement, and a PowerPoint presentation of key data.

This issue of Inside Out explores how developmental education reforms can create opportunities for faculty to engage in professional learning related to instruction.

This study suggests that career-focused dual enrollment programs—in which high school students take college courses for credit—can benefit underachieving students and those underrepresented in higher education.

This edition of Inside Out from CCRC's Scaling Innovation project outlines a framework for practitioners looking to implement a developmental education reform at their institution and describes a case study.

This practitioner packet on dual enrollment presents CCRC's findings on dual enrollment outcomes, presents a case study, and lays out guiding questions to consider when implementing a dual enrollment program.

This paper presents a simple method that community colleges can use to measure rates of program entry and completion using data on students' course-taking behaviors and suggests ways community colleges can rethink their practices at key stages of students' engagement to substantially increase rates of program entry and completion.

This report describes how Washington State's 34 community and technical colleges are implementing the Integrated Basic Education and Skills Training (I-BEST) model, which integrates instruction of basic and career-technical skills in a highly structured pathway. The report is geared toward college administrators and state higher education officials interested in implementing similar programs.

This paper summarizes findings from eight working papers (the Assessment of Evidence Series) that synthesized research on strategies for improving outcomes for community college students and makes four broad recommendations based on these findings.

This paper analyzes the patterns and determinants of student progression through sequences of developmental education, starting from initial referral, and finds that fewer than one half of the students referred to remediation complete the entire sequence to which they are referred.

This report describes how the El Paso Community College (EPCC) developed and brought to scale a system to help high school students prepare for entry into college. Since the college readiness protocol was established in 2005, fewer entering EPCC students have placed into developmental programs, and the proportion of students placed into higher levels of developmental courses has increased.

This publication compares how long it takes students to reach important progression milestones based on their level of academic readiness upon entry.

This publication, the second in CCRC’s Analytics series, examines the progression of community college students in transfer-oriented programs through the general education core curriculum.

The first in CCRC's analytics series, this publication examines characteristics of students who drop out of college after only one semester.

This paper offers methods for identifying which and to what extent introductory courses beyond "gatekeeper" math and English pose obstacles to college completion.

This study examines the phenomenon of excess credits in one community college system and presents methodologies that colleges and college systems can employ to determine the extent and distribution of excess credits for their students, with an eye to creating more efficient pathways to a degree.

Student transcripts at any one college or college system are very diverse, and programs of study can be difficult to determine. In this paper, the authors apply a clustering algorithm to the problem of understanding college transcripts. Institutional researchers can apply this clustering method to understand the course-taking patterns of students in their college or college system in order to understand what programs of study students are pursuing.

This brief describes a process by which state workforce agencies can link education and workforce data to monitor how well their education and workforce development investments are meeting labor market needs.

Noncredit programs are an important part of community colleges' offerings, but there is no standard national measurement of their educational and economic benefits. This paper makes the case for the training hour as the basic unit of measurement for noncredit workforce education programs and proposes a taxonomy of community college noncredit activities.

This guide is designed for community colleges and state agencies that are interested in analyzing the labor market outcomes of their programs and identifying opportunities for improving employment outcomes of their students.

Told from the point of view of the Miami Dade College's Office of Institutional Effectiveness, this paper describes how the college is using a variety of data to make better-informed choices about the operation of student programs and services.

This guide is intended to help researchers in colleges and state agencies to use longitudinal student unit record data to create simple and meaningful statistics on student achievement.

This brief describes the methodology that CCRC researchers used to estimate the socioeconomic status of individual students in the Washington State community and technical college system.

Based on findings from a three-year study of Washington State’s Student Achievement Initiative, this policy brief offers lessons for state leaders seeking to design effective higher education performance funding systems.

This paper describes a preferred economic definition of community college efficiency—fiscal and social cost per degree—and assesses the validity of using IPEDS data to calculate efficiency for a community college system. The analysis finds that community colleges have become more efficient over time: Fiscal and social costs per degree were lower in real terms in 2008 than they were in 1987.

This policy brief examines key issues raised by Washington State's experience with the Student Achievement Initiative, a system-wide policy to reward colleges for improvements in student achievement.

This literature review of postsecondary online learning suggests that online coursework may hinder progression for low-income and underprepared students, explores why students might struggle in these courses, and offers suggestions on how policy and practice could be changed so that online learning can better meet its potential.

Prepared for the 2010 White House Summit on Community Colleges, this issue brief discusses partnerships that promote enrollment in college, college readiness upon college entry, and postsecondary persistence.

In this issue brief, prepared for the 2010 White House Summit on Community Colleges, the authors review evidence on the effectiveness of developmental education and provide information about student progression through remediation. The authors discuss problems associated with entry assessments, review costs, and describe three initiatives designed to improve developmental education services.

This paper demonstrates that findings from a 2009 U.S. Department of Education meta-analysis concluding that student learning outcomes in online college courses are superior to those in face-to-face courses do not hold for fully online, semester-length college courses. Partly in response to this CCRC analysis, the U.S. Department of Education released a revised edition of their report in 2010.

This guide offers practical recommendations for states looking to implement a comprehensive strategy to cultivate policies that will support the success of underprepared adults. It presents guidelines on getting started for stakeholders within and outside state government.

States and local education authorities are devoting growing resources to dual enrollment initiatives, and it is important to evaluate the effectiveness of these investments. However, the data and analytic requirements for these evaluations necessitates coordination among high schools, districts, postsecondary institutions, and states. This summary provides recommendations for how policymakers can support research activities related to dual enrollment.

This policy brief contains an analysis of the impacts of performance accountability on community colleges in six states.