Results

Before reporting any results, it is important to point out that our sample size for the first year is extremely small. We ran just nine sections in two semesters for a total of 74 students.

For a control group, we are using all the students who took the traditional upper-level developmental writing course in fall of 2006, 1023 students. As time goes by, we will continue to follow this group of students until we have four years of data for them.

Based on our identification of the problem (click here for a discussion of the problem), we are gathering longitudinal data. While we are interested in pass rates for individual courses, our primary focus is on the success rates and attrition rates of students who start the developmental sequence. We want to know what happens as students move through the pipeline.

Table 5: Success and attrition rates for control group (traditional developmental writing students from fall 2006).

Table 5 demonstrates that for the control group, the 1023 students who took the traditional upper-level developmental writing course in fall of 2006, 279 or 27% succeeded in ENG 101. We followed these students for only the academic year 2006-2007. We will continue to follow them for the next three years.

In our original 1993 study, 33% of the students achieved success in ENG 101, but we followed that group for four years. It is likely that the success rate for this cohort will be similar after four years.

Table 5 also demonstrates that, for the control group, the attrition rate is 63%. We are concerned about the 419 students who didn't pass the traditional developmental course, but we are alarmed that 221 students passed the course but didn't take ENG 101 during either the winter or the spring term.

Table 6: Success and attrition rates for ALP students in academic year 2007-2008.

Table 6 presents the startling results for the first year of ALP. Of the original 74 students, 42 or 57% passed ENG 101 with a grade of C or higher. This is more than double the success rate of the control group. The attrition rate for the ALP group was 26% as compared with 63% for the control group. It is also significant that these ALP students achieved this high percentage of success in one semester, not the two semesters it would have taken them in the traditional program.

In other words, students in ALP had double the success rate in half the time.