Several colleges participating in Achieving the Dream piloted small-scale developmental education reforms with promising results. Fifteen such colleges were selected to participate in the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI) with the goal of expanding innovative strategies to a large scale across a three-year period. This report uses qualitative and quantitative data to examine the implementation of these strategies. The authors also identify factors that facilitated or hindered scale-up and assess the broader impact of the DEI on participating institutions.
Across the DEI colleges, student participation in developmental education reforms rose from 18 percent in fall 2009 to 41 percent in fall 2011. A rigorous impact study was not part of the evaluation, but analyses suggest that most often, there was no significant difference between outcomes for reform participants and nonparticipants. However, when there was such a difference, students who participated in DEI strategies tended to have stronger outcomes than those who did not.
