The Role of System Analysis in Adaptive Integration: Scaling Enrollment in the Community College Pathways

• In Event: Improving "Go to Scale" Efforts Through Adaptive Integration: Lessons From Carnegie's Networked Improvement Communities

Abstract

The success rate of community college developmental mathematics students is alarmingly low. Nearly seventy percent enter in need of remediation and eighty percent do not successfully complete college-level mathematics courses within three years (Bailey, Jeong, and Cho, 2010). As a result, millions of students are unable to progress toward their life and career goals. In 2009, the Carnegie Foundation launched the Community College Pathways (CCP), a national network of over 50 colleges aimed at dramatically improving outcomes for developmental mathematics students. The network developed and then implemented two new Pathways, Statway and Quantway. The Pathways approach is radically different from traditional developmental math in that it accelerates the progression through developmental and college-level math and approaches curriculum and instruction in a completely different way, using real-world contexts, attending explicitly to students’ mindsets and study strategies, and leveraging collaborative learning.

Within the first three years of implementation, results were dramatic. For students enrolled in one of the Pathways (Statway or Quantway), success rates skyrocketed to over fifty percent, compared to the five percent success rate typical for students in typical developmental math courses (Yamada, 2014). However, even within the colleges where the Pathways were being implemented, only six percent of eligible students were being enrolled. After establishing the proof of success in “pilot phase,” the challenge of bringing the intervention to scale required a completely different approach.

This paper applies the adaptive integration framework in paper 1 to the problem of scaling enrollment. The goal of serving more students forces colleges to address challenges across many aspects of the system, including student advising and course enrollment, articulation across programs and transfer options, recruiting and training new faculty, and building a data infrastructure to support student success. Adaptive integration facilitates authentic and lasting integration of the Pathways reform by changing local structures and policies to support the intervention and by modifying the intervention to suit the needs of the local context. This work entails:

1) Building cross-functional leadership teams that bring together departments and actors that have historically operated in silos, and developing the shared vision, trust, and communication to engage in shared learning (Hawkins, 2014; Kimsey-House, H., Kimsey-House, K., Sandahl, & Whitworth, 2011).

2) Assessing the current system to identify appropriate aims and high-leverage improvement priorities (McCannon, Schall & Perla, 2008).

3) Introducing and testing changes to both the Pathways change package and college structures, and building will at each campus through continuous demonstration of success (Langley, et al., 2009; Schaffer & Ashkenas, 2011).

4) Using data to support all improvement activities, including leveraging data resources to produce rapid analytics to track progress on aims and variation by subgroup (Provost & Murray, 2011).

In the CCP networked improvement community (NIC) (Bryk, et al., 2015), this learning is then shared across sites to ensure that each site that embarks on this change has resources and frameworks from which to begin.

Authors

• Christopher A. Thorn, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

• Angel Bohannon, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching