Many students enter the California Community Colleges unprepared for college-level academic studies and need to complete a basic skills or developmental program in order to succeed in college-level coursework. An EdSource study, Course-taking patterns, policies, and practices in developmental education in the California Community Colleges, found that colleges vary widely in how they organize remedial sequences in writing and reading.

One source of variation was the extent to which, and at which course level(s) below college composition, colleges used courses that integrate (or combine) remedial writing and reading instruction. Slightly more than half of colleges provided some form of integrated writing and reading instruction within their respective remedial sequences, with a few colleges offering them at every remedial level. The table below provides a sense of how these variations result in very different developmental course offerings in writing and reading among the colleges.

A Sample of the Variety of Remedial Writing and Reading Sequencing

 

Data: Based on course listings, descriptions, and prerequisites from the 2002 through 2009 course catalogs of the 107 semester-based community colleges in the study sample.

EdSource 6/10