The American Community College attached below introduces you to many instructional methods found in community colleges. In a post of fewer than 400 words, discuss the instructional method that you bel

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 177 6 Instruction Methods, Media, and Effects I nstruction is the foundation of all schools, colleges, and univer- sities, and several perennial issues surround this basic activity:

Who does it? How? With what effect? Undergraduate teaching in the universities particularly has commanded attention recently.

Books and articles exhort professors to spend more time with their students even if that means they do less research. Anyone with a historical perspective ﬁnds it mildly amusing to see the number of comments deploring the status of undergraduate instruction in the universities; the same contentions have been raised for the past one hundred years.

Because community college instructors have never devoted much time to research or academic discipline–based scholarship, they have been free to address nearly their full attention to instruc- tional processes. The colleges have emphasized the importance of good teaching since their earliest days, and their observers have reported unanimously that teaching was their raison d’ˆ etre. Eells called the junior college “a teaching institution par excellence” (1931, p. 389). Thornton proclaimed instruction the primary func- tion, saying that it had to be better in the two-year college than in the university because the students covered a broader range of abilities and their prior academic records tended to be undistin- guished: “It is fair to say that most community college students are able to learn but are relatively unpracticed. Under good instruction they can succeed admirably, whereas pedestrian teaching is more likely to discourage and defeat them than it would the more highly 177Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 178 178 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE motivated freshmen and sophomores in the universities” (1972, p. 42). He concluded that either the college “teaches excellently, or it fails completely” (p. 42).

Other writers followed these exhortations regarding good teach- ing with the observation that it was indeed to be found in the two-year colleges. Although rarely heard since the colleges grew large, the pronouncement that instruction was better because of the small classes was often voiced in an earlier time. In addition, junior college instructors were considered to be better than those in the universities because their pedagogical preparation was more evident and they were bona-ﬁde instructors, not teaching assis- tants. Koos reported that “classroom procedure in junior colleges is assuredly on at least as high a plane as is instruction of freshmen and sophomores in colleges and universities” (1924, p. 219). He pointed to the “superiority of teaching skill” found among instruc- tors at two-year colleges because, unlike their counterparts at the universities, most of them came from the ranks of high school teachers and had training in pedagogy (p. 201).

Even the way the colleges are organized suggests a commitment to teaching. An administrator, formerly a dean of instruction, now more typically a vice president for academic affairs, oversees the formal educational program and usually chairs a curriculum and instruction committee responsible for all major changes in those areas. The committee comprises program heads, department chair- persons, and representatives of the library and counseling services.

This allocation of instructional leadership to the administrators has enabled them to coordinate the work of the faculty members and offer incentives through instructional development grants, sabbat- icals, and release time to develop new techniques. The evolution of the library into a learning resource center and the widespread use of tutors and reproducible media also attest to an orientation to teaching.

This chapter discusses instructional technology and considers varied techniques such as online and hybrid instruction, writingCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 179 Instruction 179 across the curriculum, and supplemental instruction. Also included are comments on mastery learning, learning resource centers, and competency-based instruction. A discussion of the assessment of instructional effects completes the chapter.

Before recounting the use and effects of some of the many instructional forms in place, it should be noted that traditional classroom instruction, that is, one teacher interacting with a num- ber of students, still dominates. Most students still learn by sitting in classrooms, listening to lectures, watching demonstrations, par- ticipating in discussions, reading books, and writing examinations.

A 1998 survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Com- munity Colleges and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities found that class size averages had barely changed in the previous twenty years. Fine and performing arts had the smallest classes, averaging between twelve and sixteen students per class; applied and advanced mathematics, foreign languages, social and ethnic studies, English, engineering, physics, chemistry, and interdisciplinary sciences also tended to be smaller than the norm. Arts and music history and appreciation classes, earth and space sciences, and introductory classes in psychology, sociology, and history were typically larger, averaging twenty-seven or more (Schuyler, 1999a). However, class sizes have increased notably since then, as the budget cuts of the past several years have forced reductions in the number of class sections offered, even as students clamor to enroll in required courses.

The Technology and Discipline of Instruction One of the most persistent ideas in education is that individual- ization must be the goal in every instructional program. Numerous articles have begun with the statement, “Let’s assume that the best ratio of teachers to learners is one to one,” and then have gone on to explain how one or another instructional strategy might beCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 180 180 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE tailored to ﬁt each student. The most extreme version of indi- vidualization was realized when colleges began granting credit for learning gained anywhere. Core courses taught in singular fashion and required of everyone were at an opposite extreme. Each had its proponents, and both were evident, often in the same institutions.

A technology of instruction in which goals are speciﬁed and a variety of learning paths designed so that most students may reach those goals has made some inroads, but progress has been slow. The deﬁnitions ofinstructionthat are in use offer a clue.

Instruction may be deﬁned simply as an activity that implements the curriculum. This deﬁnition assumes a set of courses that must be brought to the students. Another deﬁnition is a sequence of events organized deliberately so that learning occurs. This deﬁnition does not depend on a curriculum, but it does include the wordlearning and implies a process leading to an outcome. But most instructors seem still to deﬁne instruction not as a process but as a set of activities (lecturing, conducting discussions, cajoling, and so on) in which teachers typically engage. Such a deﬁnition ignores both the courses and the learners.

Regardless of the medium employed, the basic model of instruc- tional technology includes clearly speciﬁed learning outcomes or objectives, content deployed in relatively small portions, learning tasks arrayed in sequence, a variety of modes of presenting informa- tion, frequent feedback on student performance, and criterion tests at the ends of instructional units. The instructors are part of the technology of instruction when they deﬁne the objectives, write the tests, select and present the media, and in general connect students to the learning tasks.

The technology of instruction has been important for two-year colleges, typically commuter institutions in which the environment of a learning community is not available to exercise its subtle yet powerful inﬂuence on the students. The tools basic to an instructional technology have been available ever since words were ﬁrst put on paper. The expansion in variety and use of otherCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 181 Instruction 181 forms of reproducible media have made additional sets of tools available. However, although all colleges have introduced some of the forms, the concepts of instructional technology have rarely been adopted on institution-wide bases. It is as though new types of hammers, saws, and trowels had been taken up by artisans unaware of the shape of the houses they were attempting to construct.

Instructors of developmental courses have been among the leaders in adopting concepts of instructional technology. During the 1970s and 1980s, this group moved steadily from the periphery of the educational establishment toward the mainstream. They became not only teachers of remedial classes but also managers of student ﬂow, and their learning centers became more integral parts of the instructional programs. They expanded their provi- sion of academic support services to instructors in the academic and occupational areas, and they became more deeply involved in measuring instructional outcomes. As a group, developmental instructors became more professionally aware, and this awareness was reﬂected in their participation in vigorously functioning profes- sional associations — the National Association for Developmental Education and the College Reading and Learning Association.

Conceptually, they coalesced around instruction as a discipline.

Many of them had begun as teachers of reading, English, mathe- matics, or psychology, but as they became deeply involved in the learning resource centers and the remedial programs their con- nections with their academic disciplines weakened. They became much more concerned with the technology of instruction.

As would be expected in this era of technological upswing, developmental instructors rely heavily on computers and computer- assisted instruction for math, reading, and writing courses. This use can take on numerous forms: incorporation of established software programs; student use of personal computers to revise writing; elec- tronic bulletin boards and chat rooms; review of classroom learning; self-paced courses; online courses; and use of study skill websites. In addition to computers, other instructional methods and academicCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 182 182 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE support strategies such as learning assistance centers, supplemental instruction and adjunct course offerings, collaborative learning, linked courses, tutoring labs, structured study sessions, and mastery learning are also embraced by developmental instructors.

Eventually, developmental instructors began teaching large numbers of freshmen not only at their own colleges but also at neighboring universities. In 1993, 35 percent of the entering freshmen at the University of California at Davis were taught remedial English by instructors from Sacramento City College.

In fall 2001, the university offered seventy-nine developmental education courses in English, math, and chemistry, serving over twenty-one hundred students in the process; by 2006, this involve- ment had grown to eighty-one sections of math, English, and chemistry plus courses in less commonly taught foreign languages.

All of these courses were taught by instructors from Sacramento City College. Similar arrangements have continued between the University of California at San Diego and the San Diego Com- munity College District. Symbiotically, the university faculty who have never wanted to teach developmental studies contracted with a group who have become experts in the task.

Television Television, the most common distance education method in com- munity colleges until the late 1990s when it was overtaken by online instruction, set the stage for later adoption of other instruc- tional technologies, and some institutions have generated a sizable proportion of their course enrollments through the use of that medium. The City Colleges of Chicago organized TV College in the 1950s, and several other community colleges also received licenses for the cultural enrichment and entertainment of the pub- lic as well as for credit-course instruction. Enrollments in the Dallas County Community College District’s TeleCollege rose from their beginnings in 1972 to over ten thousand per academic year in 1978 and nineteen thousand in 2011.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 183 Instruction 183 Beginning in the 1970s, interest in television led many colleges to develop their own materials. Video production facilities were constructed in most of the larger institutions; by 1980, two-thirds of the instructors nationwide had access to them. A few college districts — most notably, Miami Dade (Florida), Coast (California), Chicago, and Dallas — became widely recognized for the sophisti- cation of their programming. (Interestingly, whereas a university’s prestige often rests on its faculty’s scholarship and research discov- eries, the export of high-quality instructional programs provides one of the few ways that a community college can gain a reputation beyond its own district’s boundaries.) Interdistrict cooperation in production and distribution of televised courses became common, and several consortia were developed to share programs and pro- duction costs. Through television, the use of remote instruction had become well established.

Computers The introduction of the computer gave the colleges another oppor- tunity for instructional innovation. While computers have long been used by community college personnel for instructional and administrative purposes, the emergence of the personal computer in the 1980s gave considerable impetus to computer-assisted instruc- tion in the classroom, and the community colleges were not remiss in taking advantage of it. In 2001, they led in the percentage of courses reporting classroom computer technology usage. Yet with respect to the number of institution-owned desktop or notebook computers and workstations, in 2010 public universities boasted one computer and workstation for every 2.6 students, whereas public two-year schools had 6.1 students per workstation (Green, 2010). Community colleges also had fewer user support personnel per student, less wireless access in the classroom, and less inte- gration of mobile applications than universities. In 2010 the total central computing budget averaged $3.3 million in communityCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 184 184 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE colleges and $8 million in all institutions. Yet information tech- nology (IT) budgets totaled 8.4 percent of overall campus expenses in community colleges relative to 6.4 percent of expenses in all institutions collectively (Green, 2010).

Financial issues affect the community colleges’ capacity to provide instructional resources for students and faculty, and in recent years community colleges have suffered more IT budget cuts than other institutional types. Nonetheless, technology gaps between community colleges and universities are narrowing. As of fall 2010, roughly two-thirds of the courses in community colleges had a website (up from 25 percent in 2002) but well below the more than 80 percent in public universities and four- year colleges. Similarly, the faculty in just over one-half of community college courses were using learning management soft- ware compared with 61 percent in public universities. Despite a long history of underinvestment in information technology to sup- port instruction and administrative operations, community colleges clearly have done much with considerably less.

Since the 1970s, computer technology has had a role in manag- ing student records, supplementing course material, administering tests, and assessing student progress. In addition to computer- managed applications, which have become the norm in most colleges, computer-assisted and computer-based instruction in the classroom has undergone innovative developments over the past few years. Often these developments enhance teaching practices, allowing visual material to be presented electronically, improving active participation among students, exposing students to statisti- cal and other discipline-speciﬁc software, and fostering computer literacy by offering Internet access to the library catalog dur- ing class, using online versions of course syllabi, supplementing in-class activities with online course supplements, and referring students to newsgroups and e-mail chats outside of class.

Numerous studies have analyzed the effectiveness of computer- based and computer-assisted instruction. For adults, computer-basedCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 185 Instruction 185 instruction was found to produce greater gains than did tradi- tional instruction in algebra (Oxford, Proctor, and Slate, 1998).

Reed (1996) described computer-based writing classes as inclusion- ary and more democratic because such environments encourage student collaboration in evaluating their writing, and Hansman and Wilson (1998) contended that computer use is a necessary component of teaching adult students to write well. According to Klemm (1998), computer conferencing enables creativity, student engagement, and collaboration in the classroom to a greater extent than does lecturing; incorporating this technique increased teaching efﬁciency and improved the quality of students’ work. Despite these positive claims, Pankuch (1998) reported that students welcomed computerized illustrations, simulations, and graphics in chemistry courses but that the effects of computer-based instruction lessen once the novelty wears off. And very few signiﬁcant differences in retention rates and success emerge between students in traditional classes and those in computer-based math classes. Most community colleges are maintaining their publicly accessible computer labs.

Writing Across the Curriculum Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) is an instructional method- ology in which students develop writing assignments in classes in addition to English composition. In some applications, the papers are submitted to a writing instructor, who assists in evaluating them; in others, the students in composition classes work on papers that are related to the content of subject-speciﬁc classes. During the mid-1970s, WAC programs gained popularity. Responding to a perceived deﬁciency in students’ writing and thinking abilities, advocates of this approach urged the incorporation of writing into all classes and all disciplines.

WAC programs continue to be implemented. Tidewater Com- munity College (Virginia) had a WAC program that existed informally for twenty years. Faculty from diverse ﬁelds met regu- larly to discuss student writing and the implementation of writingCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 186 186 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE activities into curricula (Reiss, 1996). At Bronx Community College (New York), two writing-intensive courses are required for graduation. Students in these courses have extra writing assign- ments, involving multiple drafts, to develop writing proﬁciency.

A 1991 issue ofNew Directions for Community Colleges(Stanley and Ambron, 1991) described rather fully the history of WAC and presented various approaches to its implementation. In general, WAC programs have been popular for decades but require dedi- cation and enthusiasm to maintain them. The Tidewater program ceased functioning when a key faculty member retired.

Supplemental Instruction Supplemental instruction (SI) uses course content as the basis for skills instruction after identifying high-risk courses (basic or introductory classes with unconscionably high dropout or failure rates). Pioneered at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, it is designed to teach students to read and interpret the texts used in the academic classes they are taking. In these programs, students work outside class with tutors, who attend all lectures for the targeted course. A reader coordinates the work of the tutors with that of the instructors who have agreed to participate by encouraging their students to take advantage of the tutoring.

Supplemental instruction is associated with extracurricular peer studying, and it has been used in comprehensive programs designed for English as a Second Language (ESL) students as well as in developmental courses. Where SI has been institutionalized, the key people are a supervisor who identiﬁes the target courses and trains the SI leaders, the instructors of those courses who agree to participate, and the students or learning center staff members who attend course lectures and conduct three to ﬁve out-of-class sessions per week (Arendale, 2005). At Santa Monica College (California), supplemental instruction is arranged by linking two or more classes and having students who have previously taken them assist the new groups (Santa Monica College, 2007). It hasCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 187 Instruction 187 been shown to have a positive effect on ﬁrst-year persistence and grades because it provides students with what they most need:

additional time spent on learning skills they must have if they are to succeed in required, basic classes.

Mastery Learning Mastery learning, a technology of instruction, has been described and advocated by several educators, especially by Bloom (1973) of the University of Chicago. The intent of mastery learning is to lead all students to speciﬁed competencies (as opposed to programs that have the effect of sorting students along a continuum of individual ability). In a mastery learning plan, competencies are speciﬁed in the form of learning objectives. Practice tests, corrective feedback, additional learning time for those who need it, and a variety of instructional techniques are provided to ensure that all, or at least most, of the students attain mastery of the concepts or skills at the prescribed standard.

Proponents of mastery learning have pointed to sizable student gains on test scores and in personal development when this strategy is used. The gains have been attributed to more focused teaching, cooperation instead of competition among students, the deﬁnition of speciﬁc learning objectives, the amount of class time actually spent in learning, practice and feedback before the graded exami- nations, and teachers’ expectations that most students will attain mastery.

Mastery learning procedures have been adopted in some com- munity college courses and programs, even becoming prominent for a while at City Colleges of Chicago, but for many reasons the concept has not swept the ﬁeld. Faculty members and administra- tors who have shied away from mastery learning say it costs too much to develop and operate programs with a sufﬁcient variety of instructional forms; it takes too much of teachers’ and tutors’ time; outcomes for most courses cannot be deﬁned or speciﬁed in advance; allowing students time to complete course objectivesCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 188 188 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE interferes with school calendars; students may not be motivated if they are not in competition with their fellows for grades; employers and the public expect the college to sort students, not pass them all through at prescribed levels of competency; and accrediting agencies and other overseers demand differential grades.

For years, scholars have attempted to assess the effects of mastery learning. A synthesis of ﬁndings from forty-six studies of group-based applications of mastery learning strategies was reported by Guskey and Pigott (1988), who reported that mastery learning techniques are rarely installed in pure form but that, when they are, the effects on student learning are salutary. More recently, Zumeta and others (2012) found that mastery learning techniques are most effective when they are employed in modifying entire programs. For example, Cleveland State Community College (Tennessee) redesigned its ﬁfty-ﬁve sections of developmental math with modules, computer lab work, individual assistance, and online testing. Students move on as they complete these elements of the coursework. In this model, seventy-seven sections of eighteen students each were taught by full-time faculty at less cost and with greater student achievement.

Competency-Based Instruction Also making inroads in community colleges, competency-based education is an approach that depends on the speciﬁcation of desired competencies to be exhibited by the students but does not include all the speciﬁc instructional strategies of mastery learn- ing. The Competency-Based Undergraduate Education Project, sponsored in the 1970s by the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, wrestled with deﬁning the outcomes of liberal education. Ewens found a paradox in attempting to convert liberal education to competencies. It was the seemingly insoluble dilemma of converting higher education from an ideal- referenced standard to criterion-referenced or norm-referenced standards. “Ideal-referenced judgments presuppose some notion ofCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 189 Instruction 189 the good, the excellent, the higher, the best” (Ewens, 1977, p. 19), but most education now deals with minimal competencies, func- tioning in an environment, and meeting acceptable standards of behavior. There is no room for the ideal when we ask, “What is a competent person?” The dilemma appears with force in the tendency of all education to teach job-related skills. If education teaches for jobs, ignoring what the person is, it runs the risk of creating a corps of dissatisﬁed graduates when they ﬁnd that a job is not enough for a satisfactory life — not to mention the issue of whether they ﬁnd jobs at a level for which they were trained.

For many years, state oversight and regional accrediting agencies have requested that the colleges specify and assess the competen- cies to be learned in all programs, but especially those leading to employment. However, specifying tangible, desired outcomes has never been easy, even in the occupational areas. The span from broadly stated college goals to tasks to be performed by students at the end of a portion of a course is long, and the connections may be difﬁcult to make. The links among making people bet- ter, helping them cope with society, training them for jobs, and teaching students to type seventy words per minute on a word processor may be too tenuous. Still, the most successful adoptions of competency-based education have been in occupational studies and in adult basic education. Numerous colleges have established a Comprehensive Adult Student Assessment System (CASAS), which incorporates competency-based approaches to instruction.

Supported by a combination of state, federal, and local funds, CASAS provides programs with the resources to establish indica- tors of performance in adult basic education that integrate literacy and occupational skills instruction, primarily for the unemployed.

The system emphasizes documenting outcomes (Council for the Advancement of Adult Literacy, 2003).

Competency-based instruction has also been used as a basis for articulating secondary school occupational programs with their community college counterparts, and it has been employed in highCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 190 190 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE school completion programs. But it has not been widely adopted in liberal arts programs. When it has been applied for this purpose, it has been most successful where working face to face is feasible for a critical number of the entire staff, that is, at small colleges such as Kirkwood Community College (Iowa), where competency-based education has become the foundation of the liberal arts program.

Recent experiments with competency-based education include Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), which has started an online, competency-based associate degree program. Unlike previous competency-based programs, SNHU’s is not tied to stu- dent credit hours, instead allowing students to work at their own pace, with faculty guidance and tutors upon request. When stu- dents are ready, they are tested for 120 broad competencies broken into distinct task families. SNHU’s program has secured regional accreditation, and the Department of Education is encouraging similar programs at other colleges to seek approval for ﬁnancial aid as well as offering guidance on doing so (accreditation and federal aid being the major deterrents to previous programs not linked to student credit hours). However, in 2012, while several community colleges were offering competency-based degree programs, SHNU’s program was the only one based on competency rather than time in class.

Learning Communities The termlearning communityis often used for instructional innova- tions that build on concepts of mutual support. Deﬁned as “clusters of courses that are taught as an integrated instructional unit or through linking one course with one another” (Van Middlesworth, 2004, p. 36), they promote social integration by affording students multiple courses within a speciﬁed time, the same cluster of students enrolled in all courses, faculty collaboration, and students engaging in collaborative learning through classroom projects. Some colleges pair basic skills courses, such as writing, with courses in academic content areas. The concept of supplemental instruction, notedCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 191 Instruction 191 earlier, is often augmented with linked courses taken by the same groups of students acting cooperatively instead of competitively.

These classes may be supplemented with ﬁeld trips and related support activities.

Learning Colleges A number of institutions have begun designating themselves as learning collegesin an attempt to shift college functioning away from the instruction paradigm toward the learning paradigm. As Barr and Tagg (1995) argued, the instruction paradigm — historically the dominant of the two alternatives — “mistakes a means for an end” (p. 13), looking to teaching instead of to the outcomes produced by teaching. They emphasized that, although learning is presumptively the central feature of all colleges, the paradigmatic underpinnings of an institution determine the extent to which learning outcomes are emphasized. This acknowledges that within higher education the deﬁnition ofinstructionas an activity in which teachers engage, rather than as a process that causes learning, has been dominant.

In numerous publications, O’Banion (1996, 1997, 1999) docu- mented the characteristics common to learning colleges. Generally, traditional institutions are constrained by time, location, bureau- cracy, and the customary roles of faculty and students (the teacher as the bearer of knowledge and the student as a passive receptacle).

These limitations have the potential to hinder learning, according to O’Banion, making it essential for learning colleges to work to overcome such obstacles. He expects that learning colleges will allow students to engage in the learning process as full partners who share in the responsibility for their own learning; offer a wide variety of options for learning, including numerous alternatives in terms of time, place, structure, and delivery methods; incorporate opportunities for students to collaborate with others in learning communities; and document the learning that takes place.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 192 192 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE The literature on learning colleges has consistently evoked O’Banion’s principles, if not verbatim then in theme. Overall, learning colleges are realms (not tied by place and time) where diverse students ﬁnd opportunities to grow academically and per- sonally. The faculty become facilitators of the learning process, open to new methods and technologies now available. These learn- ing colleges are responsive to workforce needs, lifelong learners, and nearly everything else that learners demand. They document assessment, maintain accountability, and attempt to please every- one. In 2011 The Aspen Institute awarded $600,000 to Valencia College (Florida) as an acknowledgment of its progress in these directions; the 2013 prize was shared by Santa Barbara City College and Walla Walla Community College. Learning Resource Centers Community college libraries are curriculum driven, containing materials that directly support coursework, with only an occa- sional nod to faculty research. Many share facilities and collections with university or public libraries to maximize resources. Relative to the number of students they serve, the libraries at associate degree–granting institutions have modest budgets and collections, averaging $499,939 in annual expenditures and 80,315 books, e-books, serial subscriptions, and electronic reference sources, compared with $990,219 in expenditures and 392,372 holdings in the average academic library at baccalaureate-granting colleges (NCES, 2011a).

Most community college libraries underwent a major trans- formation in the 1970s and 1980s when they became learning resource centers (LRCs). In some colleges, the library remained intact, with facilities added for individual study through the use of self-instructional programs. But in many, totally new LRCs were built to encompass a library; a learning assistance center; audio and video learning laboratories; a center for the distribution ofCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 193 Instruction 193 audiovisual materials; and centers for tutorial services, graphic and photographic reproduction, and video production. About one-third of the LRCs also had career information centers and terminals for computer-assisted instruction.

The evolution has continued, with some LRCs now operating learning enrichment, tutorial, or survival skills centers or labs.

Some learning centers have taken on a status apart from library functions, operating chieﬂy as coordinating agencies for tutoring, developmental instruction, student orientation, and independent study. In other applications, LRC staff have provided material for grant writing, faculty development, and curriculum design. The LRCs often house production libraries for faculty to develop media.

They have expanded to include such electronic formats as online services, CD-ROM, and multimedia products. Automation within LRCs includes the conversion of traditional card catalogs to digital databases that are often accessible to faculty and students online, making the LRCs gateways to the Internet, other library catalogs, online indexes, databases, and texts.

Distance Learning and Online Instruction Distance learning expanded notably when online instruction became available. In 1994–95, 58 percent of community col- leges offered online, hybrid, or other distance education courses; by 2006–07 that number had ballooned to 97 percent. Over 6.1 million postsecondary students were taking at least one online course in fall 2010, an increase of over 560,000 since the pre- vious year (Sloan Consortium, 2011); 40 percent of all online course enrollments were in community colleges. Distance educa- tion enrollments have increased rapidly at community colleges, growing from 9 to 22 percent each year between fall 2006 and fall 2010 and far outpacing overall enrollment growth. In 2011, close to two-thirds of community colleges could not offer enoughCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 194 194 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE distance education courses to meet student demand (Instructional Technology Council, 2012).

Across the nation, 22 percent of community college students were enrolled in a distance education course in fall 2010, with most taking online courses in addition to classes taught in the traditional mode on campus (NCES, 2011b). In 2008–09, 34 percent of the students in Washington community colleges were enrolled in online learning; an additional 9 percent were enrolled in hybrid courses — those taught partly online and partly in the classroom (Xu and Jaggers, 2011a). In North Carolina’s Community Colleges, students taking online, hybrid, and other distance education courses through the state’s Virtual Learning Community accounted for half of all full-time student equivalent enrollments in 2011–12 (North Carolina Community College System, 2012). And in California community colleges, the number of course sections offered at a distance doubled between 2006 and 2010, reaching 9 percent of the total in 2010 (California Community Colleges, 2011).

The larger the institution, the more likely it is to provide opportunity for students to get all of their coursework online.

Nationally, more than one-third of the colleges offer full degree and certiﬁcate programs through that medium. Some colleges have made online instruction a centerpiece of all their offerings. Rio Salado College (Arizona) has combined the savings presented by employing adjunct professors with a corps of instructional design- ers. Nearly two-thirds of its students access courses online and can sign up for any of the institution’s six hundred courses in ﬁfty degree and certiﬁcate programs every two weeks. The college serves nearly 58,000 credit and 10,000 noncredit students and employs twenty-four full-time faculty chairs who develop the courses and oversee teaching and learning. These faculty members earn an average of $75,000 annually, and the 1,300 part-timers employed to teach most online classes are paid $2,500 per course ($4,500 for science courses that require additional classroom hours). The per credit hour tuition charged for the online course is the same asCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 195 Instruction 195 for the students who take classes at one of the Maricopa District’s on-site colleges, allowing Rio Salado to operate at a cost that is considerably lower than the average of its nine sister institutions.

In addition to the cost savings generated, advocates of online education cite greater access for nontraditional students as a major beneﬁt. Indeed, students who ﬁnd it difﬁcult to attend on-campus courses because of family or work commitments are more likely to take courses online than traditional students; 62 percent of online community college students are women, and half are over age twenty-six. Course completion rates in online instruction have increased since their inception, reaching 69 percent in 2010 compared with 75 percent in traditional classes (Instructional Technology Council, 2012). Yet while the online achievement gap has shrunk in recent years, it remains notable, especially as more colleges use online courses to reduce expenditures. Several studies, most notably in Washington and Virginia, have shown that online community college students are less likely to complete courses than students in face-to-face classes, even after controlling for student characteristics such as level of underpreparedness. As well, students taking courses online are more likely to withdraw, less likely to return to college in a subsequent semester, and less likely to earn a community college degree or certiﬁcate or transfer to a four-year university (Xu and Jaggers, 2011a, 2011b).

Retention and completion rates are not the only challenges to online education. Distance learning has been handicapped by policies that treat it different from traditional on-site classes.

Students who need state or federal aid may ﬁnd different policies controlling the amount they can receive if they want to take all of their classes online. Furthermore, many states and individual colleges treat funding for distance learning as a special budget item rather than incorporating it into the regular annual budgetary process. And distance learners residing out of state may be charged out-of-state tuition.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 196 196 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE Successful installations of distance education depend on the advocates’ ability to overcome obstacles such as lack of support from most people within the institution, necessary changes in student support services, and changes in institutional culture.

Oliver (2004) offered several maxims crucial to creating success- ful online instruction: institutional commitment; investment in instructional development and staff training; development of a technical infrastructure and support network; and recognition that electronic learning changes rapidly and leads to further costs. As Cox concluded, “the enthusiastic rhetoric of possibility continues to outpace the empirical evidence” (2006, p. 111). Bailey and Morest (2006) found a disjuncture between administrators and faculty, with the former saying they had to introduce online instruction to remain competitive with other sectors and the latter being more concerned that online courses lacked quality and increased their workload. Constructing high-quality distance education programs often demands more resources and a greater commitment than most college administrators are willing to expend.

Distance education received a big boost in 2011–12 when sev- eral well-known universities including Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, and Pennsylvania ﬁnanced the production of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). The term MOOC dates from 2008, but the concept is rooted in the decades-old idea of decen- tralized learning webs. These noncredit-bearing courses include an immense amount of remixed content — often video lectures — that maintains connections between ﬁelds of study and ideas. They are all free of charge; all the viewer needs is basic digital literacy and self-discipline.

The importance of credentials has spawned various ways of offering credit for the MOOC learning experience. Several proﬁt- making agencies have been formed to provide certiﬁcates of completion. (One, called Academic Room, certiﬁes more than a thousand courses.) By 2012, over 1.5 million users had partic- ipated in MOOCs, and between 10 and 20 percent of them hadCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 197 Instruction 197 purchased certiﬁcates of completion for modest sums. These awards carry no formal academic credit, and the vendors remit little money to the education providers.

Following similar efforts to award college credit for previous learning and experience, many accredited public institutions have begun offering credit to fee-paying students who submit portfolios describing what they have learned by viewing a MOOC, ideally integrating it with other experiences and displaying that knowl- edge through essays, tests, or submission of other evidence. The American Council on Education and the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning have prepared guidelines for what consti- tutes acceptable prior learning, in effect acting as accreditors.

Accordingly, any college may shift responsibility for portions of its curriculum from its faculty and award credit for courses built and maintained elsewhere. All is pushed by the so-called Comple- tion Agenda; to increase degree awards, higher education needs to expand beyond the historic high school–to-college model and bring older adults and other nontraditional students into the pat- tern. Credit for experience has been available for decades; the MOOCs open it up to many more participants.

Actually, awarding credit for experience and the more widely seen credit for passing exams has been a feature of higher education for well over half a century, since the College Board began offering the College Level Examination Program (CLEP). Now students prepare for those exams by accessing study materials through sites such as Saylor Foundation and Education Portal and pay less than $100 for the exam and accompanying credit. The major difference that MOOCs have brought is that unlike CLEP, which offers credit for thirty or more introductory (100-level) courses in English, math, history, and so forth, MOOCs elevate the level to specialized courses equivalent all the way to graduate and professional schools.

With the growth of online education and interactive media, the school becomes more important than ever before because education, critical thinking, and functional literacy are essentialCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 198 198 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE for sorting out the messages. Just as reading a book has always required the intelligence to decode print as well as to differentiate arguments, interactive media require the ability to vet the infor- mation, determining which signals are important, which are true, and which are relevant.

The more sanguine proponents of interactive media such as Lanham (1993) project the form’s effect on freedom, responsibil- ity, and individuality. Heretofore, teachers, editors, critics, and publishers have screened the various products, thereby controlling access to ideas. But by placing the individual in a position of searching all databases, interacting with everyone on the Internet, interpreting and idiosyncratically reforming all types of emanations past and present, the experts will be circumvented. All to the good, proponents say, because no one should have to suffer the biases of someone else’s selection.

Many years ago, arguments in favor of universal literacy centered on the notion that all people should be able to read the Bible for themselves without the interpretation of religious leaders.

Applied to education, similar thinking suggests that people should be empowered to learn independent of school. The ultimate in interactive media allows the learners to form their own questions, ﬁnd their own answers, construct their own texts, and develop their own knowledge.

Within the schools, interactive media must contend with sev- eral traditions that militate against their immediately displacing extant instructional forms. At the heart is the core of instruction itself. Devotees of interactive media and all sorts of reproducible instructional situations have been constantly stymied by the difﬁ- culty of duplicating a live learning situation. Whether one-on-one tutorial or small class or large lecture hall, the live learning situ- ation involves more than information transmission on the part of the instructor or responses to student questions. The live instruc- tional situation has nuances of body movement, voice intonation, expression, and cues from the instructors and other students thatCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 199 Instruction 199 come through the communally breathed air. What tone is being employed? How important is the message that is being transmitted, as indicated by the speech pattern or body language of the person transmitting it? What needs to be repeated because the respondents indicate by their faces a failure to understand sufﬁciently?

If these verbal and nonverbal cues were not as critical as they are, the various reproducible instructional programs available for half a century would have made more inroads than they have. True, some people learn through using programmed instructional materials, and these materials have become an important part of education in America, just as the mass media have become important. But the predominant form of school-based instruction is still centered on live people talking with live people and picking up all the nuances of behavior that human beings have learned to associate with messages since the beginnings of speech. Reproducible media hold a continuing allure, a promise of low-cost information transmission, but they do not contain the subtle cues to meaning that emanate from the face-to-face contact of a classroom. A nod, a frown, a smile, the shifting of bodies in chairs, the winks and blinks and twitches all have meaning that cannot be duplicated readily through a medium outside the individual.

It is reasonable to assume that, in an institution dedicated to good teaching since its inception, new instructional forms will be tried. However, despite the spread of reproducible media, tradi- tional methods of instruction still ﬂourish. Visitors to a campus might be shown the mathematics laboratories, the media produc- tion facilities, and the computer-assisted instructional programs.

But on the way to those installations, they will pass dozens of classrooms with instructors lecturing and conducting discussions just as they and their predecessors have been doing for decades.

Media are being used widely, but usually in association with or adjunctive to live instruction. Many faculty members continue to believe that close personal contact with students is the most valuable and ﬂexible instructional form that can be developed.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 200 200 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE The Power of Inertia Media-based techniques are not the only instructional forms that meet resistance. Why don’t the faculty require more writing? Many reasons can be advanced, but the one that the faculty often give is that they have too many students in their classes, that if they require their students to write more, then they (the teachers) are required to read more. In most classes, too few papers are assigned because the instructors cannot accept alternatives to their reading them.

Either outside readers are not available to them, or they do not trust anyone but themselves to read their students’ written work — and probably some combination of both. Nor have the faculty ever accepted the notion that student writing can be sampled, with only every second or third paper read or each paper read only for certain restricted characteristics. They still act as though every practice session must be critiqued, whether the student is practicing the piano, hitting baseballs, or writing compositions.

Anything that lessens direct contact with students or demands more of the instructors’ time stands a good chance of meeting resis- tance. The ad hoc lecture requires the least preparation time. And innovators must prove the positive effects of their techniques, while traditionalists can usually go their way without question. Teaching as a profession has not developed to the point at which proper conduct in the instructional process can be deﬁned and enforced in the face of individual deviation. Whereas lower teaching loads would allow more time for instructional reform, they would not be sufﬁcient to revise instruction; merely giving people more time to do what they are bent to do does not change the perception of their role, which is a major reason that PowerPoint presentations have become popular; the instructor is still in charge of the pacing and the presentations and never out of sight of the students. Still, nearly all public two-year colleges provide support for instructors who develop reproducible instructional software and courseware.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 201 Instruction 201 The rapidity with which new media appear and the stability of the academic culture are at odds. Five hundred years after the introduction of moveable type, the book and the lecture still share the territory of instruction. The inexpensive, readily available book did not displace the lecture in transmitting information; it became an additional form. Each has valuable features that the other cannot duplicate. In this respect, the academic culture resembles its societal context. Cinema did not replace live theater, nor did television replace radio. For that matter, the ascendancy of science over the past three hundred years has not fully displaced belief in the supernatural, and the vision of authority based on superior training must continually contend with a stubborn reliance on folk wisdom. Assessing Instructional Effects No type of instructional technology has been sufﬁciently powerful to overcome the traditional educational forms against which it has been pitted. With rare exceptions, an institution-wide commitment to demonstrable learning outcomes has foundered on the rocks of inertia and on an inability to demonstrate that it is worth the effort entailed. Assessing student learning is, however, as important a component of instruction as any other aspect of the process.

Is the community college the home of good teaching? Informa- tion on the effects of instruction is always hard to obtain because of the number of variables that must be controlled in any study: the entering abilities of the students; the criterion tests and instruc- tional procedures used; and the level of the course or learning unit, to name only a few. Comparative studies are especially dif- ﬁcult because of the infeasibility of matching student groups and instructional presentations (are any two lecture sessions really the same?). Rather than try to compare learning attained, many studies have used student and instructor preferences as the dependent vari- able. Researchers have measured the value of online instruction by asking students whether they preferred it to live lectures. TheCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 202 202 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE reports usually indicate that many students prefer the interpersonal contact with instructors, but many others do quite well with the instructional programs presented through the computer. But pre- and postinstructional assessments of student learning rarely yield signiﬁcant differences between treatments.

An intractable problem with research on instruction is that no method can be shown to be consistently superior to another.

Dubin and Taveggia reanalyzed the data from ninety-one studies conducted between 1924 and 1965 and concluded “that there is no measurable difference among truly distinctive methods of college instruction when evaluated by student performance on ﬁnal examinations” (1968, p. 35). The conditions of instruction are so ﬂuid, the instructors so variant, the students so different that true experimental conditions cannot be applied. McKeachie (1963) reached similar conclusions.

In the 1980s, new efforts were made to assess effects broadly, by measuring student learning through statewide, interinstitutional, and institution-wide studies, for example. Although such studies are common in most other countries, they are alien to American higher education, where responsibility for measuring cognitive change in students has been relegated to classroom instructors.

Therefore, efforts to institute such studies have been greeted with little enthusiasm. Leaders in many institutions have given lip service to the importance of student outcomes measurement, but beyond a ﬂurry of study groups and the usual skittishness displayed by educators who are faced with a potential change in their routine little was accomplished.

Many states such as New Jersey, Tennessee, Florida, and Texas have emphasized testing in basic skills for all entering freshmen.

The colleges are then encouraged to link these data with graduation and retention rates. Most such programs have progressed slowly, stung by questions of enforcement, rewards for compliance, and penalties for noncompliance. But where they really run into difﬁ- culty is when they include recommendations for content testing,Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 203 Instruction 203 learning measures to be administered as students progress through their undergraduate years.

Still, the press for assessment has continued. Alarmed at the rapid increase in cost per student, especially since the public pays most of it, and prodded by constituents who deplore the low success rates for minority students, the legislatures and appointed ofﬁcials in many states have insisted on more direct measures of college outcomes. What proportion of the matriculants obtain degrees?

How many pass licensure examinations? How many are employed in areas for which they were trained? And — most disturbing of all for a professional group that has taken pride in its vaguely deﬁned goals and processes — how much did the students learn? For the faculty especially, this last query cannot be set aside as beyond their purview. Inﬂuential outsiders are demanding to know just what is happening as a result of their ministrations.

Collecting student retention and follow-up data is one thing, but a test of student knowledge administered at the conclusion of the sophomore year is quite another. Complaints about outside control of the curriculum and the demise of academic freedom and simi- lar lamentations have become common. Examinations that reveal student learning to people outside the conﬁnes of the single class- room are anathema in academe. Few within the colleges have any notion of how to construct them. Except in rare instances, the staff makes no effort to collect and use such information until the state legislatures tie the process to college funding or student access.

Assessment changed form again in the 1990s as legislatures in some states mandated that the colleges validate their student placement procedures. Because placement testing in community colleges has provoked heated debate in many states, legal actions have led to regulations requiring institutions to provide evidence of predictive validity for their placement tests and course prerequi- sites. Also, other measures of student aptitude must be considered for placement purposes. After evaluating placement test validity, Armstrong (2000a) reported that, although correlation coefﬁcientsCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 204 204 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE show a statistically signiﬁcant relationship between placement test scores and resulting grades, these coefﬁcients are not practically signiﬁcant. Similarly, weaker correlation coefﬁcients are found at the lower curriculum levels (developmental coursework), suggest- ing little connection between placement test scores and course grades in remedial instruction. Conversely, student demographics and situational, and especially dispositional, variables are strongly related to course grades and retention. In fact, student disposition is a much more powerful predictor of success than test scores. Arm- strong (2000b) demonstrated his point further when he found that for an English placement test there was virtually no relationship between the test and student performance in class.

The way colleges are organized leads most staff members to resist measurement of learning outcomes. Students are supposed to learn history, music, and mathematics in separate courses and depart- ments. Some students learn more efﬁciently than others, and classroom tests have always been used to determine which students are better than their fellows. The national testing organizations that offer subject tests from biology to sociology, used to determine which students deserve entry to advanced school programs, play into this form of normative measurement. They work well when the purpose is to spread individuals along a continuum because they emphasize variation in student ability. This variation is so strong that the difference in scores made by students in a single course will often be as great as the difference between the class average and the scores made by another group of students who have never taken the course.

This normative model, useful for assigning places in a program or grades to students within it, is different from the criterion-referenced measures usually employed when a program or an institution is being assessed. Criterion-referenced measurement refers to the learning obtained by individuals as measured against a standard. If all students answer all questions correctly, then the entire group has learned everything that the test asked, and ifCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 205 Instruction 205 the test was designed as a sample of all knowledge to be gained in a course, program, or institution, then the instructional unit has been a total success. However, applying criterion-referenced analysis in an institution with a history of normative-referenced testing requires a complete shift in the way the staff view their work. Easy to conceptualize, that form of outcomes assessment bogs down in practice. Rare is the institutional leader with sufﬁcient patience or skill to turn the group away from its traditional way of looking at student-learning measures. Rare is the leader who can explain the value and purposes of population sampling and test development that demands items that are not course speciﬁc.

Regardless of the impetus for assessment or the model that is pursued, certain principles should apply.

The results of an examination should not be tied to a single course or instructor; causal inferences should not be sought, nor should the ﬁndings be used to judge an instructor, a department, or a discipline. The items used must not be course speciﬁc but should cover concepts that might have been learned anywhere.

Scores on the examination should not be made a condition of graduation for the students. The student population should be sampled; universal assessment systems are too cumbersome for most colleges to manage. Alternate forms of the numerous entrance examinations should be used as measures of student knowledge at the completion of certain numbers of units. The faculty must be involved as much as possible in test selection, design, item construction, and test scoring. Installation of the process should not be delayed until all are in accord. Specialists in testing who are sensitive to the staff should be employed, with the understanding that although assessment is a group effort, staff members will not be forced to participate. No one set of measures should be used to provide data for different purposes. Different measures should be used to evaluate student progress, college processes, and the college’s contribution to its community, for example.

A belief in the value of individualization need not extend toCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 206 206 T HE AMERICAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE variant curricular objectives for everyone; if shared understandings and values contribute to social cohesion, then some consistency in college goals and measures of college outcomes should be maintained.

Issues The major issues in instruction center on the extent to which a technology of instruction will progress. Will more instructors adopt instruction as a process instead of an activity? What types of instructional leadership can best effect this change?

Assessing instructional outcomes is an integral part of instruc- tional technology. Will persistent calls for mandatory assessment spread from such measures as graduation and licensure pass rates to systematic measurement of learning attained? Sampling as a basis for estimating student progress is hardly even used. From multiple matrix testing in the classroom to National Assessment of Educa- tional Progress–style assessments administered on a program-wide basis, the technique is rarely seen in any sector of higher education.

Will the learning college ideal and the contemporary external pressure for funding on the basis of outcomes act synergistically to make assessment of student learning (on a course or program level) a routine activity?

The consequences of turning away from print and in-class lectures as the primary modes of information transmission have not yet been fully realized. What impact on instruction will be made by students who have gained much of their prior knowledge online or through nonprint sources? Can student learning and outcomes generated by distance education ever approach those produced by instructional programs focused on teachers in classrooms?

Mastery- and competency-based programs have made inroads in developmental and occupational education. Can they spread to the transfer and liberal arts function? Will the willingness of regional accreditors and federal aid programs to accept competency- based programs not linked to student credit hours, as well as the awarding of credits for MOOC completion, generate costCohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 207 Instruction 207 savings for institutions and ensure greater access for students?

Will these developments substantially shift responsibility for the teaching–learning dynamic away from the faculty?

Although each new instructional medium, from radio to the computer, has forced educators to examine their teaching practices, none alone has revolutionized teaching. A general acceptance of instruction as a process that must, by deﬁnition, lead to learning might do more in actualizing the prime function of the community colleges.Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.

Cohen c06.tex V2 - 07/25/2013 6:52pm Page 208Cohen, Arthur M., et al. The American Community College, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/capella/detail.action?docID=1366278.

Created from capella on 2020-05-15 20:55:22.