Came across an interesting blog this morning in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the rising number of college students in remedial courses. The author, Mark Bauerlein, cites a number of news stories (such as this one on ACT scores) and reports that about a third of all college students enroll in “college readiness” courses to help them survive college.

Mark’s solution is that colleges and universities need to pay more attention to the intro courses that support basic skill development by getting more full professors in front of those courses. But I think Mark may not have researched this issue as well as he might……

A friend of mine once said that if you had design the least effective course for introductory courses, they would look pretty much like they do now – large lecture halls with little interactivity. Some of the comments in Mark’s blog correctly point out that this state of affairs has arisen primarily through economics ( which is why doing nothing but putting more full professors in front of large lecture halls won’t work on average).

High quality research on redesigning these courses, such as done by the National Center for Academic Transformation at RPI shows that introductory courses can be designed in ways that are both effective in promoting student learning and cost-effective.

What was much more interesting about Mark’s blog were the comments. Many of the comments discussed issues in K12 that can lead to student lacking college readiness. In particular, I found the comments that discuss university-School partnerships to be most aligned with my own experiences working with PLC-MAP, our University-school partnership focused on supporting novice science teachers. We need to all engaged because the issues affect us all.