Publications

This CAPR report documents developmental education practices used in broad-access two- and four-year colleges across the country based on a 2016 survey of public two- and four-year colleges and private, nonprofit four-year colleges as well as interviews with institutional and state leaders.

This handbook presents a wide range of research on adults who have low literacy skills. It looks at the cognitive, affective, and motivational factors underlying adult literacy; adult literacy in different countries; and the educational approaches being taken to help improve adults’ literacy skills.

In this short essay, Shanna Jaggars (coauthor of Redesigning America's Community Colleges) and Amanda Folk (head of teaching and learning at the Ohio State Libraries) discuss how librarians' expertise could be harnessed to support guided pathways reforms.

This research brief describes findings from a survey about mathematics course offerings at institutions in six states implementing mathematics pathways.

This essay compares broad academic and vocational program goals, embodied skills, tasks, and jobs, with a focus primarily on community college students.

This short report provides a rationale for implementing Lesson Study, a collaborative and structured professional development approach, in the community college context. 

This report and the five case studies that accompany it describe how institutions are managing the broad-based transformation of programs, student services, and related support systems using the guided pathways model.

This report shares the stories of four community colleges that participated in the Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) initiative, which provided support for institutions as they redesigned their advising processes and adopted and implemented new technologies.

This study examines if students participating in Dana Center Mathematics Pathways (DCMP) developmental courses enroll in and pass college-level math courses at higher rates than students who take traditional developmental math courses.

This study, conducted in partnership with MDRC, examines the effects of three institutions’ efforts to expand the use of advising technologies and to use administrative and communication strategies to increase student contact with advisors.

This paper explores how technology is integrated into developmental education programming and considerations for institutional leaders when deciding whether and how to integrate technology in developmental education.

In this brief, the authors examine how well nine measures of students’ progress in their first year predict student completion in subsequent years, and thus how suitable these early momentum metrics are as leading indicators of the effectiveness of institutional reforms.

Using transcript-level data from two community college state systems and a nationally representative survey, this short report examines how course-taking in humanities and liberal arts at community colleges affects transfer and outcomes at four-year colleges.

This short report provides a systematic accounting of the provision of humanities and liberal arts education at public colleges in the United States, including community colleges.

This paper describes key features of CUNY Start mathematics and how it differs from traditional developmental education.

This brief examines the expansion and adaptation of the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), using Bronx Community College as an illustrative case study.

This paper examines factors within the community college context that affect the experiences and academic outcomes of the English learner population broadly and students who enroll in ESL courses in particular.

In 2012, Quad Learning partnered with two community colleges to pilot American Honors, a program designed to help academically talented community college students overcome the challenges of transferring to more selective four-year destinations. This paper traces the components of the program's socially conscious theory of change, its for-profit business model, and the tensions between the two. 

In this piece for the Teachers College Record, CCRC Director Thomas Brock describes how mixed methods may be used in education research and offers advice to researchers who are seeking funding from IES for mixed methods studies.

Written in conjunction with the Education Commission of the States, this brief provides an overview of multiple measures assessment and placement and describes how several states are implementing the approach.