From Black Box to Pandora’s Box: Evaluating Remedial/Developmental Education

While debates for and against developmental education have been vociferous, the effectiveness of these programs is not well understood. Relatively few evaluations of remedial programs have been conducted, and many existing evaluations are useless because, failing to recognize what the program does, they provide little information about what should be changed to make it more effective. In place of this kind of “black box” evaluation, the author recommends a variety of evaluation approaches that can improve information about many different aspects of remediation, including not only its effects but also the instructional methods used, the progress of students, and the ways students are assigned to remedial programs. The author terms this a “Pandora’s Box” approach because it aims to open up the black box to reveal the problems with existing programs and the potential reasons for their effectiveness or ineffectiveness, and then to improve them.