Teaching Academically Underprepared Students in Community Colleges
By Dolores Perin
This chapter discusses instructional approaches intended to prepare initially low-skilled college entrants for the reading, writing, and mathematics skills they need to learn from the postsecondary curriculum. The nature of college readiness and characteristics of academically underprepared students are presented.
Traditional approaches, which often overemphasize isolated skills and overlook authentic applications, do not appear sufficient to address the considerable diversity of students in career goals, degree aspirations, prior educational experience, race and ethnicity, English language proficiency, and motivation. It may be more expedient to focus developmental education instruction directly on literacy and math practices found in college-level content-area courses.
The chapter offers several recommendations based on prior literature, including structuring developmental education to maximize opportunities for interaction between developmental and college-level course instructors, increasing the rigor of developmental instruction through contextualization, and providing well-thought-out professional development to enable developmental instructors to contextualize instruction with an eye to promoting college readiness.
This chapter was published in Understanding Community Colleges, edited by John S. Levin and Susan Kater.
