assessing the accelerated learning program model for ... · assessing the accelerated learning...

A n d e r s t , M a l o y , a n d S h a h a r / A s s e s s i n g t h e A c c e l e r a t e d L e a r n i n g P r o g r a m 11

> Leah Anderst, Jennifer Maloy, and Jed Shahar

Assessing the Accelerated Learning Program Model for Linguistically Diverse

Developmental Writing Students

This article uses quantitative and qualitative means to assess the impact of an Accelerated Learning Program on the performance and satisfaction of students designated ESL

and developmental at a large, urban community college.

Over the past ten years, two-year college writing programs have participated in a significant movement toward accelerated learning, designing and implement-

ing a variety of Accelerated Learning Programs (ALPs). Created by Peter Adams at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in 2007, ALP invites students who have been placed into remediation to enroll concurrently in two linked courses taught by the same instructor: an upper-level developmental writing class and a credit-bearing first-year writing course. Rather than a prerequisite to credit courses, then, the upper-level developmental course becomes a co-requisite, so students can move into college level courses more quickly.

This article describes the implementation of an Accelerated Learning Pro-gram at a large two-year college, Queensborough Community College (QCC), located in Bayside, New York, and part of the City University of New York (CUNY), a large university system composed of two-year and four-year colleges. We explain how we used ALP best practices to design and facilitate such a program, knowing that the model has been successful elsewhere. In addition, we explain the unique characteristics of our program, which integrates English language learners (ELL) and native English speakers (NES) in our writing classrooms and also requires ALP students to pass a high-stakes writing exam to exit remediation and receive a let-ter grade in their first-year writing course. To explore both the effectiveness and uniqueness of our particular model, we examine student surveys and demographic data from students enrolled in the second semester of our program. In analyzing this data, we attempt to understand why and how this program works for students with different educational and linguistic backgrounds, in terms of pass rates and retention rates, and specifically how students’ perceptions of themselves as writers is impacted by this program. We demonstrate that ALP proves successful for both NES and English as a Second Language (ESL) students, even within an institution that requires a high-stakes exam as an exit from writing remediation.

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Copyright © 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

12 T E T Y C Vo l . 4 4 , N o . 1 , S e p t e m b e r 2 0 1 6

In addition, we describe (through a preliminary analysis of survey responses) the effect that this program has on students’ sense of satisfaction in their writing course and their development of identities as college writers in comparison with survey responses of students enrolled in a developmental writing course designed only for ESL students. Our analysis shows that while students enrolled in the tra-ditional ESL courses gain a sense of satisfaction within their developmental courses over a semester, ALP students, a group that mixes ESL and NES students on our campus, lose that sense of satisfaction over the same period. This result may seem surprising considering that the ALP students ended up doing better in their courses than their non-ALP peers. However, we understand the ALP-student dissatisfaction as a reflection on the developmental component of the two ALP courses only, a course that the students may no longer consider necessary because by the end of the semester they may come to view themselves as college-ready. This data might suggest an argument in support of ALP that may be lost in analyses that focus solely on program efficiencies and outcomes: the ALP model, as opposed to a traditional developmental model, may more effectively position students institutionally and psychologically as college writers.

While possessing some unique features, our ALP model is similar to the models found at over two hundred two-year and four-year colleges across the United States. As Peter Adams and others have described, writing program administrators (WPAs) have seen ALP as a successful way to mainstream students who have been identified as needing additional support in writing beyond a first-year composition course. WPAs argue that students in ALP courses benefit from smaller class sizes, increased contact with their instructors, an immersive experience in writing and reading, and a strong peer community (Adams et al.). During its existence, ALP has had widespread success, reducing the many exit points developmental students face, helping students succeed in credit-bearing writing classes, and lowering attrition along the way (Adams et al.; Hern). While there is limited scholarship on specific reasons for the effectiveness of ALP, the success of the model has been widely documented by Adams and others at CCBC, by researchers at Columbia Univer-sity’s Community College Research Center (CCRC), and by Katie Hern and her colleagues in the California Acceleration Project (Adams et al.; Hern; Cho et al.).

Specifically, Adams et al. argue that ALP doubled the passing rate of basic writing students while halving their first-year writing course attrition rate. While Jenkins et al. do not see the same retention benefits for ALP students in their 2010 study for the CCRC, they do conclude that ALP students were more likely than their non-ALP counterparts to complete and pass the first-year composition course connected to their developmental writing class through ALP (ENGL 101), as well as a second semester of required writing (ENGL 102). In addition, they conclude that ALP students tend to attempt more college credits than their non-ALP coun-terparts and that ALP proves cost effective for students. In the CCRC’s follow-up study from 2012, Sung-Woo Cho et al. again conclude that ALP students are more successful in ENGL 101 and ENGL 102, although white and high-income students seem to benefit the most from ALP. Thus, at this point in ALP research, there is

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clear evidence that such models offer a variety of benefits over more traditional models of developmental writing at the community college level. At the same time, more analysis of program structure and pedagogy as well as student performance beyond first-year or second-year retention is essential to truly understanding the effectiveness of the ALP model. Furthermore, ALP research most often focuses on NES populations alone, while our model and our research includes ELLs, a growing population of college students who, we argue, would benefit from greater exposure to acceleration.

ALP at Queensborough Community College

Our adoption of ALP at QCC beginning in the spring of 2014 sought to replicate much of the success that WPAs and researchers have identified in previous models. We hoped to increase the numbers of students who made it from developmental courses into credit-bearing courses and to help them persist in their education at QCC and beyond. Largely adopting CCBC’s model, our ALP courses link two sections: one section of an ALP designated upper-level developmental writing or reading course (BE 112 or BE 122, re-spectively) with one section of English 101, the first of the first-year writing sequence at QCC, with both courses taught by the same instructor. In our model, the developmental course has fourteen students, and English 101 has twenty-four students. For English 101, ten “mainstream” or English 101–only students join our ALP students. For each of our ALP course pairs, the individual instructor who teaches both courses has the freedom to develop his or her own curriculum. While course themes or readings vary from instructor to instructor, the curriculum in all of the ALP course pairs on our campus includes overlapping elements between the two courses, such as themes, readings, or writing assignments. This encourages our ALP students to begin to see the links between the work they do in the developmental course and in the credit-bearing course.

Our pilot semester of two ALP writing sections, while admittedly small, did replicate the success of ALP models in other institutions and proved more success-ful than non-ALP developmental courses at our institution. In our pilot semester, nineteen of twenty-seven ALP students (or 70%) passed our university’s high-stakes writing exam, the CUNY Assessment Test of Writing (CATW), and, thus, passed the developmental course. Of those nineteen students, seventeen (93%) earned passing grades in English 101. As a comparison, the many sections of BE 112 and BE 205, our campus’s upper-level developmental writing courses offered for native speakers of English (NES) and for English language learners (ELLs), respectively, together had an overall pass rate of 47% in the same semester. For our pilot semester, all of

We hoped to increase the numbers of students who made it from developmental courses into credit-bearing courses and

to help them persist in their education at QCC and beyond.

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the ALP students came to us from lower-level developmental writing courses, and their instructors had recommended them. The pilot semester students were, then, identified as high-performing and motivated students.1 During our second semester, the fall of 2014, the period from which we gathered a majority of the data that we discuss here, we ran four sections of writing ALP and two sections of reading ALP. With more courses to fill, we once again enrolled continuing students who had passed their lower-level developmental courses and were recommended by their instructors, but we also drew from new incoming students and from students who had participated in two of the summer precollege programs QCC offers. While our pilot semester students in spring 2014 were all recommended by instructors teaching lower-level developmental courses, many of the students in our fall 2014 semester came from a variety of tracks, similar to students enrolled in non-ALP upper-level developmental writing courses on our campus.2

One unique feature of our ALP model is that we open our ALP courses to both NES developmental writing students and ELLs who have been identified as ESL students by our college and may come to ALP from an ESL writing track. While some colleges that have implemented ALP may indeed allow students iden-tified as ESL to take ALP courses, the departmental and programmatic structure of many two-year colleges may separate ELLs from NES students in a way that limits the number of ELLs in ALP. In a 2002 article, Amy J. Blumenthal describes the variety of ESL programs offered at two-year schools: some offer college credit and are located in or as academic departments on campus, others have a vocational focus and provide students with certification, while others are offered to adults free of charge through continuing education. In addition, Blumenthal highlights the diversity in placement processes and locations of ESL programs, as some are independent departments or programs on campus while others are housed within English departments or composition programs. The recently published National Census of Writing (Gladstein and Fralix) confirms Blumenthal’s findings, document-ing that 80% of respondents from two-year colleges stated that their college’s ESL courses were separate from basic writing courses (n = 220). In addition, only 29% of respondents claimed that their ESL program was housed in the English department, while 9% stated that their program was located in an Intensive English Program, and 57% stated that the ESL program was located in an “Other” space on campus, most likely a stand-alone department or one that is connected to developmental or supplemental education (n = 80). Such institutional divisions between writing classes offered to ELLs and mainstream composition courses have the potential to make inclusion of ELLs in ALP a logistical—and possibly pedagogical—challenge.

As instructors at a two-year college with a significant ELL population, we believe this is an important facet of ALP models for multiple reasons. Most impor-tantly, the population of ELLs in higher education is increasing (Matsuda; Preto-Bay and Hansen), particularly at two-year colleges where many ELLs, primarily immigrant students, begin their college experience (Bunch and Endris). In fact, up to 25% of community college students are immigrants (Crandall and Sheppard; Miller-Cochran). As the population of ELLs is rising at two-year colleges, and

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as the variety of ELLs is expanding at many institutions, the structure of writing programs often remains static, with ELLs placed into ESL tracks of writing and students who are identified as NES placed into separate tracks. This may become problematic, however, as research has indicated that the placement of ELLs into these two separate tracks often correlates with their success in college. Cate Almon finds the lower the level into which ELLs are placed in ESL writing courses, the lower their GPAs and retention rates. Despite these findings, ELLs often lack information about placement processes, consequences, or options when they enter two-year colleges (Bunch and Endris). For example, Aria Razfar and Jenny Simon find that ELLs who “mainstream earlier or concurrently enroll in content level courses are more successful in terms of course completion and GPA” (595), and Shawna Shapiro argues that there is increasing evidence that “support for multilingual/ESL writers is most effectively implemented through a non-remedial model in which courses are credit-bearing, content-rich, and collaboratively-designed, with input from mainstream academic programs and disciplines” (25). Our ALP model at QCC incorporates these recommendations for ELLs by encouraging students who qualify for our upper-level developmental writing courses and who come from both our NES developmental and ESL tracks to participate in ALP. Furthermore, as we show in our data analysis, ELLs participating in ALP maintain high pass rates in both their developmental and English 101 writing courses.

Another unique and challenging feature of our program is the standardized high-stakes test that students are required to take to exit remediation, in both NES and ESL tracks. All two-year and four-year colleges within our university system are required to use the CATW to determine students’ placement in various levels of developmental writing or in college-level writing, English 101.3 The CATW is a timed writing exam administered and scored by faculty members from across the university. Students who take the CATW have ninety minutes to read a passage of about three hundred words and to write a response where they demonstrate their comprehension through summary and their critical thinking by responding to the points presented in the reading. Students take the CATW for placement purposes but also to exit out of remediation. Thus the CATW puts our students into developmental writing, and it is the exam they must pass in order to move into college-level writing. While individual instructors have the power to promote students from lower-level to upper-level developmental writing courses, our stu-dents’ ability to move out of remediation is determined solely by their score on the CATW. This remains true for students enrolled in ALP and non-ALP designated developmental courses.

For our purposes, this exam has some benefits and some drawbacks. On the one hand, scholars such as Edward M. White and Judith Scott-Clayton have argued over the past twenty years that standardized, high-stakes placement tests “measure only a small component of what is needed for student success,” and such tests stand the risk of functioning as more of “a social-sorting mechanism” than an objective representation of a student’s ability as a college writer (White 28). Writing place-ment exams often guide students to differing tracks—basic writing, ESL, first-year

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composition, honors courses, and exemption—that position students differently not only within writing programs but also within colleges. Moreover, placement exams often are implemented as a reaction to shifting student populations and colleges’ struggles to adjust to students’ differing experiences and needs (Huot, O’Neill, and Moore). Institutional moves from one placement process to another can be more political than pedagogical, even though, as Susanmarie Harrington discusses, they have important “local consequences.” The placement process of a writing program, Harrington argues, often serves as the first interaction that students have with a writing program and sends a message to students about what a writing program values in student writing. As a two-year school that is part of the CUNY system, we are part of a long history of writing placement (Soliday) that has changed over the years in response to many factors—including shifting student populations—that campuses minimally control on a local level. Examining our current placement exam, the CATW, in relation to our ALP has indeed shown us how the CATW may function as a sorting mechanism that has local consequences, as it often serves as the sole representation of writing that faculty members see as they place students.

On the other hand, the CATW helps to legitimize the success of our ALP students because it adds a level of what might be considered “objective” oversight on the numbers of students who successfully make it through our ALP courses. It removes the possibility of instructor bias, which may be a concern for high pass rates in ALP courses on other campuses (Adams et al. 65). Still, however, as the sole measure of students’ writing abilities, the CATW may add a sense of anxiety to our students’ experiences in developmental courses. It also forces ALP instructors to spend a fair amount of class time on test preparation rather than offering instruction and activities geared toward English 101 assignments. Other ALP models, such as that at CCBC, do not have the same kind of high-stakes exit exam, so their ALP developmental writing courses have greater flexibility to focus on English 101 as-signments and tasks.

Current debates connected to high-stakes standardized testing in develop-mental education have given us pause for reflection as we have designed our ALP at QCC. High-stakes writing exams that are used to determine students’ exit from remediation may not alone be a strong predictor for preparedness or success in col-lege courses (Gleason), and organizations such as the Two-Year College Association have recently argued for placement processes that use multiple measures. As Holly Hassel and Joanne Baird Giordano state in the September 2015 issue of College English, “the border between college-ready and non-college-ready is blurry” (58), and standardized tests do not necessarily assess whether individual students will or will not succeed in college-level credit-bearing courses. Placement processes that use standardized tests can be particularly troublesome for ELLs, as Deborah Cru-san describes in “An Assessment of ESL Writing Placement Assessment,” drawing upon research that demonstrates how ESL students may struggle with time limits and other artificial conditions imposed by standardized writing exams even more so than NES students. The complexities of using standardized writing exams have caused us to consider the extent to which this type of placement may not always

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reflect students’ writing abilities and yet may provide us with a way to measure their progress within ALP.

In consideration of these unique features of our ALP model at QCC, it is important to investigate how students, particularly ESL students, fare in ALP in terms of their performance on their standardized exit exam, the CATW, as well as in terms of their satisfaction levels compared to students in our traditional devel-opmental courses. During our fall 2014 semester, upon institutional review board (IRB) approval, we collected demographic and academic information on ALP and non-ALP students with support from QCC’s Office of Institutional Research. In addition, we administered student satisfaction surveys at two points in the semes-ter to ALP and non-ALP students who agreed to participate in our study. In the remainder of this article, we provide an analysis of our data, demonstrating that students in our ALP courses achieved higher pass rates on the CATW than our traditional NES developmental and ESL students. In addition, we argue that our ALP students displayed a different sense of student and writerly identity in their satisfaction surveys compared to students in traditional ESL courses.

CATW and English 101 Results for ALP Students

Since the ALP as described above differs in significant ways from QCC’s traditional developmental classes in terms of course structure and scale (among other variables), the analysis presented below represents a preliminary evaluation of the program’s effectiveness.4 In order to begin a preliminary evaluation on the effectiveness of the ALP writing program, we measured how different the pass rates were for ALP students and non-ALP students on the exit exam. These different pass rates were considered before and after post-semester workshops, which were made available to nonpassers in both populations who met certain criteria. Finally, exit score data were also parameterized along the ELL/native English speaker (NES) axis in an at-tempt to see how ELLs responded to the program both in relation to NES students in the ALP and to ELLs in the traditional developmental track.

The preliminary evaluation of the program’s effectiveness was also consid-ered from the English 101 perspective. ALP students’ grades were compared to all other non-ALP students’ grades. The comparison was for both the English 101 population in general and for the “mainstream” English 101 students in the ALP sections, but not in the developmental writing class (BE) (that is, they passed the placement/exit exam before English 101).

Finally, as a way to contextualize any differences observed between the ALP BE students and non-ALP BE students, we considered differences in demographic data between students in the ALP and those not in the ALP. That is, we wanted to identify other variables that may have led to differences in outcomes for ALP and non-ALP students beyond the program itself. Data such as students’ gender, full-time student status, high school GPA, college GPA, ethnicity, and academic standing (that is, first semester, continuing, or advanced standing) were analyzed.

Overall, the results show that ALP students in general did significantly bet-ter than students in the traditional BE track in the initial semester, as well as in the

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second semester of the program after follow-up workshops. The results also show that after follow-up workshops ELL students did significantly better than a non-ALP ELL cohort, in fact having the highest pass rate of any cohort in the study. Examination of English 101 grades shows no significant difference between ALP and non-ALP students in sections of English 101 taught by ALP instructors.

Table 1 shows that in the program’s first semester, spring 2014, there was a statistically significant difference in the pass rate for students in the ALP. Initially, the pass rate for the ALP was almost 26 percentage points higher than the general BE population, and the difference grew to 30 percentage points after a follow-up, test-prep workshop. In the following semester, with twice as many students drawn from continuing and new students, the initial pass rate for ALP students, while higher, was not statistically significant. However, after the follow-up, test-prep workshops, there was a statistically significant difference of 27 percentage points. It can also be seen that the withdrawal rate in the second semester was significantly lower for ALP students.5

The initial cohort of ALP students did not have enough students for us to evaluate differences between NES and ELL pass rates. However, in fall 2014, we did have enough students, and Table 2 shows the difference between the different populations. The ALP’s pass rate for NES was not significantly different initially or after follow-up, test-prep workshops. For ELL students, the initial pass rate was

SPRing 2014 FALL 2014

Non-ALP ALP Non-ALP ALP

Initial pass ratea 44.22 % 70.37* % 46.85 % 56.14 %

Follow up pass ratea 55.56 % 85.19* % 52.35 % 73.68* %

Withdrawal rate 17.96 % 6.9 % 15.66 % 1.72* %

Number of students 373 29 332 58

TA b L E 1 . Pass rates and withdrawal rates for ALP and non-ALP cohorts during the first two semesters of ALP

aPass rates are calculated only for students who received a P, R, or NC; that is, students who didn’t withdraw. *p<.01

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higher by 17 percentage points for ALP students, but it was not significantly dif-ferent. However, after follow-up, test-prep workshops, ELL students had a pass rate 40% higher than the ELL cohort not in ALP, a statistically significant difference. What’s more, the pass rate for this population was the highest of any of the cohorts, NES, ELL, ALP, or non-ALP, for the follow-up pass rate.

Table 3 measures any difference in outcomes for ALP students in the gate-way course itself, English 101. Students in the ALP received significantly fewer A’s than the general non-ALP English 101 cohort. However, when the ALP cohort’s grades were compared to the non-ALP cohort’s grades with English 101 instructors who taught ALP courses, there was no difference in the number of A’s given or the number of B’s or C’s given. This is arguably a clearer measure of ALP gateway course performance because the ALP cohort is being compared to the non-ALP cohort with the same instructors. The only significant difference that existed between the ALP cohort and the non-ALP cohort with ALP instructors was a significantly lower number of C- and lower grades for ALP students.

nES ELLa

Non-ALP ALP Non-ALP ALP

Initial pass rateb 55.95 % 54.84 % 40.4 % 57.69 %


Follow-up pass rateb 57.9 % 64.52 % 43.4 % 84.62* %


TA b L E 2 . Pass rates for NES and ELL cohorts during fall 2014 in ALP and non-ALP sections before and after workshops

aStudents are classified as ELL only if they had enrolled in a BE ESL class or the college’s Language Immer-sion Program previous to ALP. bPass rates are calculated only for students who received a P, R or NC; that is, students who didn’t with-draw. The difference in student numbers for Non-ALP columns between initial pass rate and follow-up rate is primarily related to INC grades that changed into P, R, or NC. *p<.001

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Finally, Tables 4 and 5 compare the demographic and educational profiles of students for ALP and non-ALP students. Table 4 shows that the only significantly different demographic variable was sex, with the ALP nearly 64% female. Table 5 compares the educational profile of the students both while enrolled at the college and before entering. The GPA data show that ALP students had significantly higher GPAs compared to the non-ALP cohort. In addition, the college admissions average (CAS), which is a measure of student proficiency entering the college, basically high school GPA, was significantly higher for the ALP cohort than for the non-ALP cohort. It is worth noting that the CAS data were only available for about half of the students in both populations. In addition, when the GPA data for ALP students were compared to non-ALP students who had already passed the reading exam before the semester, the significant difference in GPA between ALP students and non-ALP students disappeared.6

Taken together, these results suggest the success of the ALP can be extended to include an ALP with ELLs and a standardized exit exam. ALP students had more success exiting the developmental class when compared to the non-ALP students (Table 1) by measure of a standardized exit exam. Furthermore, when post-semester workshops were included for both ELL and NES students both in the ALP and in the non-ALP tracks, ALP students did significantly better in the developmental class compared to non-ALP students, with ELLs in the ALP having the highest overall pass rate (Table 2). These positive results in the developmental class were not accompanied by a compromise in success in English 101 grades for ALP students (Table 3).

These results do need to be considered with the caveat that there were slight differences revealed in the demographic data, namely ALP students; when their high school GPAs were available, they had higher high school averages than those of non-ALP students (Table 5). In addition, there were more female ALP students relative

TA b L E 3 . English 101 grades for ALP and non-ALP English 101 students

*p<.05, **p<.01

101 STudEnTS ALP STudEnTS

Non-ALP sections

ALP section non-BE students

Pre- workshops

Post- workshops

A’s 25.11 % 8.51**% 10.34** % 10.34** %

B’s or higher 47.66 % 29.78* % 34.48* % 44.83 %

C’s or higher 60.89 % 55.32 % 46.55* % 63.79 %

C–’s, D’s, F’s 15.31 % 19.15% 5.17* % ---

Number of students 3,756 47 58 58

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TA b L E 4 . Comparison of demographic profiles of ALP and non-ALP cohorts

TA b L E 5 . Comparison of educational profiles of ALP and non-ALP cohorts

*p<.05

non-ALP STudEnTS ALP STudEnTS

Female students 45.9% 63.8*%

Full-time students 83.6% 87.9%

Ethnicity

Hispanic 22.2% 24.1%

Black, non-Hispanic 22.5% 13.8%

Asian or Pacific Islander 39.5% 48.3%

White, non-Hispanic 8.5% 3.4%

American Indian or Native Alaskan 1.2% --

non-ALP STudEnTS ALP STudEnTS

GPA 2.2 2.7*

GPA standard deviation 1.42 1.17

CAS average 74.9 78.2**

CAS standard deviation 7.41 7.32

% of students with CAS scores 50.8% 48.3%

Student description

First-year students 30.7% 20.7%

Continuing students 62.9% 74.1%

Advanced standing transfer students 6.4% 5.2%

*p<.02 **p<.04. Statistically significant difference in GPA does not exist when comparing GPA of ALP students with non-ALP students who are only in writing sections, but CAS difference is maintained.

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to the non-ALP cohort (Table 4). However, even with these differences in cohort construction, the results taken as a whole suggest the ALP, even when it includes ELLs and a standardized exit exam, is a promising model for developmental students.

Analysis of Student Surveys

In addition to gathering the above data on students’ pass rates and demographics for our fall 2014 cohort, we created an online survey designed to provide us with a sense of students’ perceptions of their courses as well as of themselves as writers. One of the primary questions we had about ALP as we approached our research and our creation of this survey was, how do students perceive being in an “ac-celerated” class linked as it is to an “English” class? Is their perception of the ALP

developmental course different than that of students enrolled in traditional devel-opmental courses? As many who work in the fields of composition and basic writing acknowledge, labels like remedial, developmental, and ESL can carry a stigma that students may internalize and that

may impact their engagement and their learning in the courses (Adams; Hayes). With the survey we hoped to gain insight into how our ALP model, which mixes ELLs with native speakers of English, impacts some of those issues for our students. We wondered if the model would do for our ELL students, who face the double labeling of developmental and ESL, what it seems to have done for NES students on other campuses: namely, provide them with a sense of being college-ready students.7

Students who completed the survey came to us from two sections of BE 205, QCC’s upper-level developmental writing course designed for ESL students, which is capped at 26 students, and three ALP designated sections of upper-level developmental writing, which mixes ESL students with native English speakers and is capped at 14 students. The students in the five sections who agreed to participate in our study completed the survey online in our learning center computer lab twice during the semester. On the first survey, administered during the sixth week of classes, 30 ALP and 15 ESL students participated. On survey two, administered during the fourteenth week of classes, 21 ALP students and 23 ESL students participated.

The fifteen survey questions (Appendix B) focus solely on the developmental courses, and they can be broken down into roughly three categories: questions that address students’ overall satisfaction and “fit” in the course, questions that address students’ confidence and their perceptions about the preparation the course offers them, and questions concerning students’ sense of community within the course. We look closely at the responses to a few questions related to “fit” and satisfaction in order to compare ALP students’ responses to those from students enrolled in the ESL-designated courses and in order to see how the responses shifted from early in the semester to late in the semester. We suspected that the responses of students enrolled in ALP classes would reveal their overall increased satisfaction and a greater

How do students perceive being in an “accelerated” class linked as

it is to an “English” class?

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sense of community and meaningfulness in the class. Proponents of the ALP model often cite precisely these reasons for the program’s success compared to traditional developmental courses (Adams et al. 60).

By and large, our suspicions were borne out in the students’ responses on the first survey. There, for all but one question, ALP students chose either strongly agree or agree at higher rates than did the students enrolled in ESL-designated courses. Early in the semester, ALP students appear to have more positive perceptions of their developmental course, of their abilities as writers, and of the preparation the course will give them. Ninety percent of ALP students, for instance, agreed or strongly agreed that this BE course is right for them (question 4), what they are learning in the course is meaningful (question 6), and this course will help prepare them to pass the CATW (question 8). Students in the ESL-designated courses, by contrast, agreed or strongly agreed to those same questions in this way: 46% said that their BE course is right for them, 53% say that what they are learning in the course is meaningful,8 and 46% say the course will help prepare them to pass the CATW. At week six, students enrolled in ALP felt more appropriately placed, found the course content more meaningful, and felt as though they were being well prepared to exit remediation by passing the CATW.

Curiously, though, those responses shifted in the second survey. In every question in survey 2, the students enrolled in the ESL courses chose strongly agree or agree at higher rates than they had in survey 1, on some questions as much as doubling the percentage. The responses of ALP students in survey 2, on the other hand, were often reduced from survey 1, sometimes by only a few percent-age points, sometimes by as many as 20 percentage points. So it would seem that students enrolled in ESL courses greatly improved in their overall satisfaction as the semester unfolded, while the satisfaction levels of students enrolled in the ALP courses appeared to decrease. Focusing on the results from a few of these questions may provide some insight into the source of these shifts.

Survey questions 3 and 4 ask students about satisfaction and “fit” directly. Figures 1 and 2 are charts that show the responses of “agree” and “strongly agree” to questions 3 and 4 of our two groups of students, ALP and ESL, and the ways that those responses changed from the beginning to the end of the semester.

While ALP students’ responses indicate an initially much higher sense of satisfaction and fit in their BE course than the students in ESL-designated courses, these charts show precisely how much those responses changed late in the semester. ESL students’ satisfaction (question 3) jumped in survey 2 (from 40% to 74%), and ALP students’ satisfaction remained largely the same (moving from 73% to 71%). The responses to question 4, however, indicate quite a different change. While ESL students once again increased in their rates of choosing “agree” or “strongly agree” on whether they feel their BE course is right for them (from 46% to 82%), ALP students’ rates dropped (from 90% to 67%). The overall increase in these responses from students in the ESL-designated courses seems initially promising. It suggests that something positive may be happening for students in those courses. Perhaps, over the course of the semester, these students come to understand that the ESL-

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designated course is helping them improve their writing. This increase may also indicate the students’ level of comfort in their ESL-designated courses, a level of comfort that could reflect their acceptance of themselves as “ESL students” as op-posed to simply college students. While the decrease in these responses for students

F i g u R E 1 . Question 3: I am satisfied I am taking this BE course.

F i g u R E 2 . Question 4: I feel this is the right BE course for me.

Solid line = ALP; dashed line = ESL

Solid line = ALP; dashed line = ESL

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enrolled in ALP courses was unanticipated, we hypothesize that it may point to a positive feature of the ALP model: developmental students no longer thinking of themselves as such.

At week fourteen, very close to the end of our fifteen-week semester, the ALP students, now having spent a full semester in English 101, a class from which they had been previously prohibited, may have felt that the developmental course, the course about which they responded to these questions, was no longer “right” for them. It is important to underscore that question 4 does not ask them whether they feel ALP is right for them or whether both courses that are part of ALP are right for them; it asks whether the BE course is right for them. Perhaps, by the semester’s end, some of these students saw themselves as English 101 students, as “college material.” Perhaps they saw themselves as similar to their non-ALP peers also enrolled in their English 101 courses, in which case they would likely feel that no developmental course is right for them. ALP students’ responses to question 3 might be taken to corroborate this view. There the numbers decrease much less, so these ALP students remain satisfied even though their sense of the course as being “right” for them decreased.9

In 2009, Peter Adams noted the strong psychological impact that main-streaming models such as ALP may have on developmental students: “We think mainstreaming has a powerful psychological effect for basic writers. When students placed into basic writing are allowed to go immediately into first-year composition, their sense that they are excluded from the real college, that they are stigmatized as weak writers, and that they may not be ‘college material’ is greatly reduced” (Adams et al. 60). Over the course of one semester in English 101, our ALP students have a reduced sense of “fit” in their developmental courses. This decrease that we note in feeling that the developmental course is right for the ALP students from our study may indicate the students’ positively shifting self-perceptions: they may now see themselves as “college” students, not “developmental” students. They may see themselves as “college material,” as Adams puts it. For students who are traditionally placed into ESL-designated courses, this positive shift in self-perception is powerful, and it is one reason why we feel that ALP models should be made available to ELL and NES students both, as our model is.

Anecdotally, some of Anderst’s ALP students from the fall 2014 semester (her class was not included among those that completed these surveys) expressed frustration toward the end of the semester, explaining that they felt they were do-ing just as well, if not better, in English 101 as their peers who were not also in the developmental course. Through regular group work and peer review, Anderst’s ALP students frequently read the work of their nondevelopmental peers and came to the conclusion (which was correct for many of them) that they were no less able than those other students to complete college-level work. In her class of 15 ALP students, 12 passed the CATW (80%), and of those 12, all of whom passed English 101, 9 received an A or B. So they indeed showed themselves to be college material.

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Conclusion

Our analysis of CATW scores for ALP and non-ALP students shows that ALP students are achieving college-level proficiency according to a non-instructor-based measurement at higher rates than their non-ALP counterparts. This is true for both the entire population of ALP students as well as ELLs enrolled in ALP courses on our campus. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the program overall as measured by a standardized tool, and it also makes the case for the effectiveness of this program for ELLs who are not always included in ALP models at other schools. Likewise, English 101 pass rates for ALP students demonstrate that these students are indeed able to perform at a college level beyond the assessment of the standardized tool, which research has indicated may or may not accurately represent students’ academic writing abilities.

Another way in which we have attempted to understand the effectiveness of the ALP model, particularly compared to traditional ESL courses, has been through student survey data. Student responses have shown that as students in ESL courses gain a sense of satisfaction and fit within their developmental courses, ALP students in fact lose that sense of feeling that the developmental course is “right” for them. This result may seem surprising considering that the ALP students ended up do-ing better than their non-ALP peers. We could explain this finding in many ways. It could point to possible problems with the ALP model, a model that, especially given our college’s emphasis on a single, high-stakes measure of writing compe-tency, may be excessively intensive and stressful for certain ELL students. Another interpretation to consider, however, is that the survey data demonstrate that ALP students are beginning to see themselves as something else besides developmental writers and are gaining a sense that their developmental class is not “right” for them. Rather than seeing this as a potential problem within ALP, we could view this as a success, which is corroborated by ALP student performance on the CATW and in English 101: ALP students are effectively becoming college writers through the program. This may be particularly significant for ELLs within ALP because it posi-tions them both institutionally and psychologically as college writers rather than isolating them within an ESL track. <

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non-ALP bE STudEnTS ALP STudEnTS

Total ELLs Total ELLs

English 39.2% 2.3% 11.9% --

Non-English 60.8% 97.7% 88.1% 100%

Spanish 14.9% 16.1% 16.7% 26.1%

Sino-Tibetan 22.1% 44.8% 35.7% 34.7%

Other 37.8% 36.8% 35.7% 39.1%

Specified total 222 86 42 23

Missing/not specified 32.5% 28.7% 27.6% 11.5%

Total 329 122 58 26

TA b L E 6 . Language of native descent of BE ALP students and non-ALP upper-level BE students

non-ALP bE STudEnTS ALP STudEnTS

Total ELLs Total ELLs

Englisha 48.7% 12.5% 29.6% 18.8%

Other 23.1% 50% 29.6% 43.8%

Equal 28.2% 37.5% 40.7% 37.5%

Specified total 195 64 27 16

Not specifieda 40.7% 47.5% 53.5% 38.5%

Total 329 122 58 26

TA b L E 7 . Language of comfort of BE ALP students and non-ALP upper-level BE students

aOf the students who claimed English as their native language, not all then reported English as their language of comfort. That is, they considered a language other than English to be their language of comfort. We have assumed the remainder of the students who reported English as their native language, though not reporting English or any other language as their language of comfort, consider English their language of comfort: 45% ELL in ALP; 37% ELL in non-ALP. This is not a statistically significant difference.

A P P E n d i x A

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A P P E n d i x bInstructions: Choose one of the five responses from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree for the following questions. You may write additional comments to each question in the blanks provided.

1. Before I came to QCC, I felt confident as a writer.

2. Because I am taking this BE course, I feel less confident as a writer.

3. I am satisfied that I am taking this BE course.

4. I feel this is the right BE course for me.

5. I am challenged by the course materials.

6. What I am learning in this course is meaningful.

7. I am interested in the course materials.

8. I feel this course will help prepare me to pass the CATW.

9. I feel this course will help prepare me for English 101.

10. I feel this course will help prepare me for other college courses.

11. I am confident that I can successfully complete college-level writing assignments.

12. I am comfortable talking to my classmates about the course materials and assignments.

13. I am comfortable talking to others such as professors or tutors about the course materials and assignments.

14. I would recommend this course to all BE students at QCC.

15. I would recommend this course to any student at QCC, BE or not.

16. I am enrolled in: BE 112 / BE 205 / ALP-BE 11210

notes

1. Some students in our program’s first semester required developmen-tal courses in both reading and writing. For most of those students, the model proved too intensive, so in subsequent semesters, we have limited ALP courses to students who have only one remedial need in either reading or writing.

2. The two summer programs are one designed for native speakers of En-glish, which provides students with intensive precollege reading, writing, and math instruction aimed at helping them test into credit bearing courses, and an intensive language program for students whose level of English does not allow them to test into any of the college’s courses.

3. There are some students who do not take the CATW for placement pur-poses on our campus. For example, students who have scored a 75 or higher on the New York State Regents Exam in English or who score 20 or higher on the English portion of the ACT or 480 or higher on the Critical Reading section of the SAT are not required to take the CATW prior to enrolling. These students go directly to English 101.

4. Throughout the analysis z-tests were used to test statistical significance because almost all of the populations were thirty or more students and because the primary measures for difference between the programs are pass rates, which are binary. Students either pass or they don’t, and the z-test confirms whether

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the percentage of passers considered along with standard variance and popula-tion sizes is statistically significant. Furthermore, while CATW scores could be analyzed with t-tests, the high-stakes nature of the exit exam directed our focus on pass/fail outcomes.

5. In an attempt to control for the reading level of the students in the ALP, an analysis was done comparing ALP students with non-ALP students who had already passed the reading exam (like ALP students). The ALP cohort did have a 20 percentage-point higher pass rate than the non-ALP cohort, and the p for the difference was quite low (p<.07).

6. See Appendix A for a breakdown of the language profile for students in the ALP and those in the traditional classes for further contextualization of the difference between ALP and non-ALP students in developmental classes.

7. Brisa Galindo et al. describe their strong reactions to being labeled reme-dial writing students by their university in “Challenging Our Labels: Rejecting the Language of Remediation.”

8. Adams suggests that ALP classes provide a more “meaningful context” for student learning: “In ALP, the ENGL 101 class provides a meaningful context for the work students do in the companion course” (61).

9. While each of our survey questions included a comment box for students to write in additional responses to each question, very few did so. A fruitful avenue for future research would include questions specifically asking students to identify aspects of the courses that informed their responses. Such a survey could ask them to identify, in other words, what they feel informed their sense of fit and satisfaction with their developmental course, possibly including the role of high-stakes testing.

10. While we had no traditional BE 112 courses (upper-level developmental writing for native speakers of English) participating in our study, we anticipated that we would when we created the survey. The option of a non-ALP-designated BE 112 remained in the survey we provided to students.

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Leah Anderst is assistant professor of English at Queensborough Community College. Jennifer Maloy is assistant professor of academic literacy at Queensborough Community College. Jed Shahar is assistant professor of academic literacy at Queensborough Community College.

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