What High School Students Say About Supporting Their Success in Credit Recovery

• In Event: Multiple Perspectives on the Use and Experience of Credit Recovery for High School Students

Abstract

Objectives and perspective
Credit recovery (CR) courses, including their online variants, are growing in prevalence but their effectiveness has long been questioned. More research is needed on how to better implement these courses to make them more culturally responsive to the needs of racially diverse students. Students of racially non-dominant backgrounds must overcome racialized barriers such as teachers’ expectations of students, as well as non-academic factors that disproportionately affect them (Okura, 2022; Jussim et al, 1996; Ochoa 2013). While research has described the characteristics of students who enroll in CR courses, and their academic effects, comparatively less research has asked how students experience CR.

High school (HS) students who complete CR coursework can provide valuable insights about the racialized and classed assumptions guiding CR instruction, yet they are rarely included in course design or refinement. To address the limited student voice in the discourse around CR, this paper presents findings from student interviews that describe the experiences, perspectives, and outlooks of HS students who took CR in Summer 2022.

Methods
We leveraged a qualitative research design to generate interview data from HS students participating in CR. The extended, semi-structured interviews were designed to reveal students’ understandings of CR opportunities and the context, meanings, and relationships that anchored them. Students were asked to compare their perceptions of several factors across both the original course that they failed as well as the CR course. The interview protocol and analysis were guided by the following overall research questions: What, if anything, do students in CR think worked better for them in the CR course than the original course they failed? What did not work as well in the CR course and why? Interview transcripts were analyzed with software by two researchers who reviewed transcripts and identified substantive themes from across cases.

Data sources
We conducted two, 40-minute interviews, with 17 unique respondents, selected from a convenience sample of HS students who took Algebra 1 or English 9 credit recovery courses in Summer 2022 in a large urban school district. All students participated in both interviews and all students successfully passed the CR course.

Results
For students who fail core courses and pass them in CR, the importance of one-on-one time with the teacher was the most common theme students mentioned. However, student-teacher time does not address the many racialized barriers to passing the original course. Additional factors students said helped them learn in and pass the CR course included a more accommodating climate, especially with deadlines, as well as opportunities to develop academic study skills.

Significance
As districts increasingly turn to CR courses to remedy learning loss, the field will need to understand what works for HS students, and why, to effectively design more supportive instructional environments for them. This paper demonstrates that speaking directly with students can help identify where to focus reform efforts. For example, our findings suggest that instructional options that reserve instructional time for students to work one-on-one with the teacher are more likely to address student needs.

Authors

• Oshin Khachikian, American Institutes for Research

• Mary Bridget Burns, Independent consultant

• Iliana Brodziak de los Reyes, American Institutes for Research

• Peggy Clements, American Institutes for Research