Third Annual Redesign Alliance Conference 2009
March 22-24
The University of Texas at Brownsville and
Texas Southmost College
Brownsville, Texas
Dr. Leslie K. Jones

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Current annual enrollment (READ traditional & redesign):
Approximately 350-400 students per year
Number of sections offered per year:
Traditional 20
Pilot 15
Traditional course structure:
The traditional College Reading III is a non-credit based course designed to help students develop and learn to apply a repertoire of active reading study strategies for comprehending and studying texts according to complexity of text and discipline.
The goals of the redesign project:
1. Enhance student learning in the paired courses.
2. Increase student motivation and retention.
3. To encourage transference of reading/study strategies to general education courses.
4. To lower institutional costs.

Overall Objective of Developmental
Education
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This is often achieved by:
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Offering an active learning environment as opposed to passive learning
Provide scaffolding of transferrable learning skills and strategies
Providing repeated real life practice opportunities
Providing a risk-free learning environment

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Problems with the Traditional
Course
Need to be able to measure or evaluate whether or not developmental education is effective .
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Solutions offered through the
Redesigned Course
Evaluate student performance in the general education course to determine the effectiveness of the developmental reading course.
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Need to enhance learning and increase completion rates in both the College
Reading and the general education courses.
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Redesigning the College Reading III course by aligning the student learning outcomes and the instructional activities with the general education courses (in this case GOVT I) allows scaffolding in the reading course to enhance success in the general education course. Enhanced learning leads to increased completion rates.

Problems with the Traditional
Course
Solutions offered through the
Redesigned Course
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Need to encourage transference of skills and strategies to academic courses
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Need to increase motivation
(developmental is a non-credit course and students don’t immediately see the relevance of the student learning outcomes nor the corresponding instructional activities.
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Offer real life experience by allowing concurrent enrollment in a linked general education course
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Concurrent enrollment in a credit bearing general education course should increase motivation as well as help clarify the relevance of the learning in the reading course .

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Several measures were taken to compare the mastery of the student learning outcomes in the redesigned and traditional reading courses (Nelson Denny Reading Test, 6 scales of the LASSI, and use of common rubrics to measure reducing and organizing of text)
However, the results indicate no statistically significant difference on the majority of them.
Our conclusion is as we suspected from the beginning. Specifically, we felt the traditional reading course was already very strong in helping students master the student learning outcomes, which are as closely aligned to general education courses as possible when offered in the traditional format.
More importantly, we wanted to investigate how well each of the courses prepared students to be success in the general education courses, specifically the online GOVT I course.

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95% of the students enrolled in the redesigned course linked with the online GOVT course successfully completed the class which is comparable to the 92% of the non-developmental students enrolled in the traditional online GOVT course.

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86% of the students enrolled in the redesigned course also made A’s and B’s compared to 87% of the nondevelopmental students enrolled in the traditional online
GOVT course.

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The students enrolled in the redesigned developmental reading course slightly outperformed the nondevelopmental students enrolled in the traditional online GOVT course on the government post-test with a cumulative average of 92% versus 91% for the traditional online GOVT students .

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Reduce the number of sections from 20 to
15 per year
Increase each section size from 25 to 30 students thus reducing number of faculty from 4 to 2
Cost-per-student reduction from $311 to
$157, a savings of 51%.

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Problems:
1. General education faculty participation (i.e. misconceptions concerning dev ed., time and effort associated with collaboration)
2. Students with limited technology experience
3. Not enough time for technology trainings
4. Insufficient number of personnel to cover open lab
5. Technical problems with technology and the need for communication with IT
 Solutions:
1. Provide informational presentations
2. Provide additional technology trainings
3. Build more time in course calendar for technology trainings
4. Recruit, train, and hire additional personnel for open lab
5. Better planning and collaboration with IT department