“What the Hell Is Revise?” Community College Students’ Approaches to Remedial Coursework

• In Event: Strategies for Facilitating Student Success at Community Colleges

Abstract

This paper reports the findings from a classroom-level study of multiple sections of remedial English in an urban-serving community college. Drawing on classroom observations and participant interviews, the findings detail how students approached their remedial coursework (at least initially) as they did in their urban K-12 school experiences where success (a passing grade) was predicated upon simply “turning something in.” Generally, the students who developed new approaches to their coursework passed the class. The findings detail how the students succeeded or failed by demonstrating a) the logic they used to approach their coursework, b) how their approaches interacted with the observed pedagogy, and c) how students did or did not change their approaches during the semester.

Author

• Stefan Perun, Seton Hall University