Technology Use in Developmental Education: Experiences, Challenges, and Rationales

ABSTRACT

As community colleges increasingly integrate technology into developmental education, it becomes important to understand how technology is used in these programs, what challenges institutions have encountered relating to technology, and what considerations institutional leaders take into account when deciding whether and how to integrate technology in developmental education. This study explores these questions drawing from semi-structured interviews with key personnel from 31 open-access two-year public colleges, 11 broad-access four-year public colleges, and 41 state-level organizations overseeing such colleges. We find that institutions are integrating a variety of instructional, course management, and student support technologies into developmental education. In doing so, institutions have encountered a number of challenges, particularly with regard to end-user difficulties with technology. We also find that evidence of effectiveness of technology for improving educational outcomes was considered by a number of organizations in our sample when making decisions about technology use in developmental education; however, other considerations – particularly those based on costs and resources – were also quite influential. Indeed, such economic considerations were described to us more often than evidence of effectiveness by respondents discussing reasons for using technology in developmental education.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to the following individuals who provided valuable comments on previous versions of this article: Thomas Bailey, Elisabeth Barnett, Susan Bickerstaff, Angela Boatman, Maria Cormier, Nikki Edgecombe, Alexander Mayer, Shanna Smith Jaggars, Julia Raufman, and Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow. We thank the journal editors and two anonymous reviewers for helpful feedback on a previous draft of this article. We are also grateful to Kimberly Morse and Doug Slater for their editorial work.

Notes

1. Portions of this article were reused from a Community College Research Center (CAPR) Working Paper, September, 2017. The Community College Journal of Research and Practice (CCJRP) obtained permission from the author and the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness to reprint online and print portions of materials found in the working paper, originally titled, “How and Why Higher Education Institutions Use Technology in Developmental Education Programming”.

2. Another component of this descriptive study involves a nationwide survey about developmental education practices. The survey results are not part of the analysis presented in this paper.

3. For purposes of this study, a “broad-access” institution is one that has admitted at least 70 percent of applicants according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) database. We note that some community colleges in our sample confer bachelor’s degrees as well as associate degrees and various certificates. For simplicity’s sake, we refer to such institutions as two-year public colleges or community colleges, terms we use interchangeably.

4. These institutions were drawn from a list of broad-access institutions for the larger descriptive study’s national survey, which asked institutions around the country about their developmental education assessment and instructional practices. The state-level organizations in our sample came from a list developed by the research team of state-level organizations overseeing, representing, or coordinating at least one broad-access higher education institution.

5. Instructional technology appears to be more widely employed in developmental mathematics than in developmental English among the organizations in our sample. While emporium-style classes, mathematics computer labs, and online courses have been used to teach developmental math, respondents mentioned fewer instances of such extensive technology use in the teaching of developmental English. This does not imply that technology is not often used in developmental English instruction. To the contrary, many of our respondents identified various ways that technology has been used in teaching developmental English. The use of technology to teach mathematics, however, was more central to course delivery and reported more frequently among the organizations in our sample.

6. Wernet et al. (2000) found that older-than-traditional students identified the “course calendar” aspects of a learning management system as instrumental to their involvement and enhanced performance in a course (p. 500). Additional research is needed to determine if the same applies to underprepared students.

7. Issues relating to challenges with technology use was a finding that emerged in the process of data collection; therefore, not all of our respondents discussed it. In this section, when we describe the proportion of “respondents who discussed challenges,” this refers to the proportion of only those respondents who described technological challenges in their interviews, which was respondents representing a little less than half of the organizations in our total interview sample. We do the same later in the paper with regard to rationales for technology use, which were discussed by respondents representing just over half of the organizations in our total interview sample.

8. Although not characterizing this as an availability issue, a small number respondents noted that students with disabilities may need particular accommodations with regard to technology. For example, a university system-level respondent explained that institutions within the system are “very aware of making sure that students who have disabilities are accommodated in that technology.”

9. Also, our findings about challenges associated with technology use in developmental education largely align with challenges related to technology use in education more broadly as described in the literature (e.g., Bell & Federman, 2013; Butler & Sellbom, 2002; Groff & Mouza, 2008; Harrington, 2010).

Additional information

Funding

The research reported here was undertaken through the Center for the Analysis of Postsecondary Readiness and supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305C140007 to Teachers College, Columbia University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.