Publications by Susan Bickerstaff

This Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative report examines how faculty and staff at nine institutions reconsidered students’ online learning needs in the midst of the pandemic, and it explores how supports were offered to help students strengthen their self-directed learning skills.

This Postsecondary Teaching with Technology Collaborative brief discusses some of the challenges with online teaching reported by STEM instructors, describes a self-directed learning (SDL) framework to address these challenges, and highlights support strategies that can be integrated into teaching practices.

This paper describes research that prompted developmental education reform, explores efforts in California that led to the passing of A.B. 705, summarizes research on its implementation and outcomes, and discusses the implications of this research for improving postsecondary access and success.

Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data, this report presents findings from research on humanities coursetaking at Michigan community colleges conducted as part of the Strengthening Michigan Humanities project.

This report describes the rationale, goals, and activities of the Strengthening Michigan Humanities project, and it provides statewide statistics and trends on community college enrollment, transfer, and bachelor’s degree completion in humanities fields.

In a review of impact and implementation studies from the past ten years, this CAPR report summarizes what is known about how innovations to developmental education can improve student outcomes, and it draws out five principles that are key for reform.

Based on fieldwork at six institutions, this report describes how colleges are implementing Caring Campus/Staff, a program designed to engage nonacademic staff in improving interactions with students and fostering a culture of caring at community colleges.

Using administrative data, this report examines early college outcomes of students placed into corequisite reading courses at the 13 community colleges in the Tennessee Board of Regents system.

This article describes how lesson study—a structured, collaborative professional development intervention—encouraged developmental mathematics faculty at three community colleges to implement new approaches to instruction.

This report describes a project undertaken by CCRC, Education Northwest, and three Oregon community colleges to adapt lesson study for use among faculty teaching a precollege (developmental) quantitative literacy course.

This article argues that by tying instructional improvement efforts to ongoing reforms, colleges may be able to take advantage of structures and mechanisms employed by the reform to make teaching an institutional priority.

This article establishes the importance of adjunct faculty in supporting student success, describes the experiences of adjunct faculty, and offers suggestions for disciplinary societies that seek to meet the needs of adjunct faculty.

This brief describes the importance of nonacademic staff to the student experience and presents initial findings related to the Caring Campus initiative’s capacity to affect college culture and ground further change efforts.

This brief discusses how community college systems in four states—Indiana, Virginia, Texas, and Washington—supported large-scale changes to student placement practices in reaction to challenges associated with the COVID pandemic.

This report describes findings from a study of a two-year initiative led by Achieving the Dream to develop and implement strategies to support adjunct faculty in improving student outcomes.

This paper describes the professional development model used in CUNY Start, a program developed at the City University of New York to support entering students identified as academically underprepared in literacy and mathematics.

This paper discusses what is known about humanities coursework in community colleges, outlines key challenges facing humanities education in this sector, and considers approaches to addressing these challenges.

This report examines the efforts of six state higher education systems to improve student outcomes and close opportunity gaps in mathematics as part of a three-year project led by the Charles A. Dana Center at The University of Texas at Austin.

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

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

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

Using interview, focus group, and survey data, this brief explores the experiences of part-time faculty at six Achieving the Dream leader colleges working to engage adjunct faculty in student success initiatives.

This report describes the Mathematics Pathways to Completion project developed by the Charles A. Dana Center and the condititions that facilitate the statewide implementation of math pathways reforms.

In this article, the authors posit that a reframing of academic preparedness is warranted, and they outline three potential strategies for addressing academic underpreparedness beyond the structural and curricular reforms to developmental education taking place in many colleges.

This chapter in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research reviews the structure and effectiveness of traditional developmental education and provides a history of first-, second-, and third-wave reforms and research on those approaches.

Using interview, focus group, and case study data, this paper documents the perceptions and experiences of faculty members in the midst of statewide reform efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to integrate developmental reading and writing courses.

Using interview data from students at three community colleges, this paper examines shifts in confidence that students experience early in their college careers.

This paper discusses the implementation of modularized developmental mathematics reforms in North Carolina and Virginia, presents student outcomes for two distinct course structures, and considers the opportunities and challenges they present.

This article uses qualitative data from a multi-campus study of instructional reform in developmental education to present a typology of questions raised by community college faculty teaching in reformed contexts.

This chapter describes a promising approach to teaching developmental arithmetic and prealgebra and presents findings on a faculty support network that helped instructors adopt new teaching strategies.

This issue of Inside Out identifies and explores the implications of three faculty orientations toward reform that consistently manifest when an innovation is introduced: ready to act, ambivalent, and reluctant to change.

Based on survey and focus group data from four community colleges, this research brief discusses why many students who go on to enroll in developmental math are unlikely to prepare for the math placement exam.

Drawing on a scan of remedial reform efforts and fieldwork at 11 colleges, this paper examines trends in reform implementation and provides a framework for strengthening reform efforts and institutional capacity.

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

A study of College 101 courses at three community colleges in Virginia suggests that these courses could have long-term impacts if they focused more on the application and practice of learned skills.

This edition of Inside Out, a publication of CCRC's Scaling Innovation project, outlines a three-part framework for colleges looking to adopt and adapt a developmental education reform.