Measuring the effectiveness of developmental writing courses

Community College Review, Fall, 2004 by Anne Hay Southard, Jennifer K. Clay

The Courses

At Florida community colleges, students are placed into developmental courses by their score on the FCPT. At OWCC, a developmental writing course, College Prep English II, is required for students scoring between 69 and 82 on the sentence skills portion of this state-mandated placement test. As well as teaching grammar, College Prep English II teaches writing skills, including sentence structure, paragraph construction, coherence, revision, and editing. The developmental sequence may begin with College Prep English I if a student scores below 69 on the placement test, but all developmental students must take College Prep English II. The college credit sequence begins with an elective, Writing and Grammar, but students may and often do choose to enter Composition I directly from College Prep English II. Composition I focuses on organizing information and ideas in written outlines, communicating effectively in writing, locating research sources and documenting them in MLA format, and writing and passing a timed essay. At OWCC, all writing courses, including developmental courses, are limited to 22 students, and students must earn a C in order to pass these courses.

A Florida statute requires that college students write across the curriculum, although the implementation of this requirement is largely left to individual institutions. During the span of this study, OWCC students wrote 6,000 words in Composition I, in Composition II, and in other courses in the humanities, for a total of 24,000 words per student. For part of this study, we looked at all these writing-intensive courses.

The Placement Test

According to the OWCC test coordinator, the FCPT, designed by The College Board, consists of 35 questions of two different types. The first type requires students to choose the correct word or phrase to substitute for the underlined incorrect part of a sentence, and the second type requires that students choose a version of a sentence rewritten according to specific criteria while maintaining the same meaning as the original sentence. The FCPT tests the following skills: sentence logic, coordination and subordination, and recognizing complete sentences (J. M. Buchanan, personal communication, July 30, 2003). In its current coordinator guide, The College Board notes that students who score "about 86" on the sentence skills section of the test will be able to handle complex verb tenses and coordination and subordination, correct sentence fragments and misplaced modifiers, and resolve sentence problems that involve both grammar and logic (College Entrance Examination Board, 2002).

The Participants

In this study, the researchers examined the transcripts of 929 students. The participants were divided into four groups of students who were enrolled in OWCC's English course sequence between the fall 2000 and fall 2001 semesters. Students in Groups 1, 2, and 3 scored 82 or below on the FCPT and were therefore placed in College Prep English II or had been placed in and passed College Prep English I. The 58 students in Group 1 passed College Prep English II and enrolled in Composition I. The 48 students in Group 2 were also enrolled in College Prep English II, but although they were successful in College Prep English II, they did not subsequently enroll in Composition I. The 29 students in Group 3 were placed in College Prep English II, but these students failed the course. Groups 1, 2, and 3 were all enrolled in College Prep English II during the fall of 2000; thus, successful students had three more semesters in this study in which they could have enrolled in Composition I. For the purpose of this study, the researchers did not consider whether the participants had completed College Prep English I.