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Does Mathematics Remediation Work?: A Comparative Analysis of Academic Attainment among Community College Students

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Abstract

Postsecondary remediation is a controversial topic. On one hand, it fills an important and sizeable niche in higher education. On the other hand, critics argue that it wastes tax dollars, diminishes academic standards, and demoralizes faculty. Yet, despite the ongoing debate, few comprehensive, large-scale, multi-institutional evaluations of remedial programs have been published in recent memory. The study presented here constitutes a step forward in rectifying this deficit in the literature, with particular attention to testing the efficacy of remedial math programs. In this study, I use hierarchical multinomial logistic regression to analyze data that address a population of 85,894 freshmen, enrolled in 107 community colleges, for the purpose of comparing the long-term academic outcomes of students who remediate successfully (achieve college-level math skill) with those of students who achieve college-level math skill without remedial assistance. I find that these two groups of students experience comparable outcomes, which indicates that remedial math programs are highly effective at resolving skill deficiencies.

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Notes

  1. An alternative interpretation suggests that remedial coursework actually protects academic standards by allowing college-level courses to address college-level material (McCabe 2000).

  2. It is possible that some students may begin at one community college and then transfer to another community college, or may simultaneously complete courses at two or more community colleges. To account for these possibilities, course enrollments for each student were observed across all semester-based community colleges without regard to the first institution of attendance.

  3. While the data do not contain direct measures of SES, the receipt of financial aid serves as an indirect measure and is not without precedent as an indicator of SES in research on remediation (Koski and Levin 1998). DesJardins et al. (2002) offer a persuasive argument for using offered financial aid as an indicator of SES, but these data were not available.

  4. The contextual variables were transformed as necessary to approximate a normal distribution.

  5. Although movement from one college to another is not uncommon among community college students (Bach et al. 2000), this model cannot capture these changes. An alternative specification using a cross-classified data structure would allow the college in which a given student is enrolled to vary, but would treat a student enrolled in multiple colleges as different students (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002).

  6. As this is a counterfactual argument, it is only a supposition based upon the evidence.

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Tim Brown, Willard Hom, Myrna Huffman, Tom Nobert, Mary Kay Patton, and Patrick Perry of the Chancellor’s Office of California Community Colleges for their assistance with the data employed in this study. I thank Elisabeth Bahr for her assistance with the editing of this manuscript. Finally, I am grateful to John C. Smart and the anonymous referees of Research in Higher Education for their respective recommendations concerning improving this work.

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    Peter Riley Bahr

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Bahr, P.R. Does Mathematics Remediation Work?: A Comparative Analysis of Academic Attainment among Community College Students. Res High Educ 49, 420–450 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-008-9089-4

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