FAST FORWARD: A Case Study of Community College Programs Designed to Accelerate Students...

“This report presented a case study of acceleration programs at two colleges: Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Tarrant County College in Fort Worth, Texas.

Faculty at Broward developed a model called ‘Math Redesign’ that compresses the traditional sixteen-week developmental math courses into eight weeks, so that students could complete two levels of developmental math in a single semester. The model also included collaborative problem-solving during class and computer-assisted instruction outside of class.

At Tarrant County, faculty divided each developmental math course into three modules, in a program called ‘ModMath.’ Through a more fine-grained placement process, students were able to skip content that they had already mastered. During class, students worked at their own pace on computers using an instructional software package, while the instructor worked with students individually. The self-paced nature of ModMath potentially allowed students to complete more than three modules per semester” (p.iii). (Abstractor: Author)

Full publication title: FAST FORWARD: A Case Study of Community College Programs Designed to Accelerate Students Through Developmental Math

• “Both colleges succeeded in implementing their programs as originally envisioned, strengthening them, overcoming challenges along the way, and scaling them up to serve more students each year of operation. • Faculty leaders, motivated by engaged administrators and data-driven decision-making, helped the colleges grow their programs and fold them into broader student success agendas. • Student outcomes data collected and analyzed by the colleges suggest promising trends associated with the programs, including higher success rates and lower withdrawal rates than for students in traditional math courses at the colleges” (p.iii). (Abstractor: Author)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2013
• Author(s): Fong, Kelley; Visher, Mary G.
• Organizational Author(s): MDRC
• Funding Source: Lumina Foundation
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Melissa Mack
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies