Contextualizing Developmental Education in Introduction to Sociology Courses: Impacts on Community College Students’ Sociological Imaginations

• In Event: 3166 - New Research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Abstract

According to the Community College Research Center at Teachers College of Columbia University, 68 percent of community college students in the United States take at least one developmental reading, writing, or math course in pursuit of their associate degree (Jaggars and Stacey 2014). Representing a significant expense for students, developmental education is also largely ineffective and frequently experienced as a barrier to college graduation (Jaggars and Stacey 2014). One suggestion for improving students’ college readiness and their developmental outcomes is the contextualization of basic reading, writing, and math skills in credit-bearing content-area college courses across the disciplines. At the time of this writing, little is know about the impacts and implications of this contextualization on students’ learning in the aligned credit-bearing content-area courses. Drawing on data from students’ end-of-semester reflections in two separate efforts to contextualize basic skills in Introduction to Sociology at Queensborough Community College (QCC) of the City University of New York (CUNY), this paper lends support for contextualization—of math and reading/writing—while addressing the impacts of contextualization on students’ understanding of sociology (or sociological imaginations).

Author

• Amy Elizabeth Traver, City University of New York-Queensborough