Increasing Momentum for Student Success

Since the fall semester of 2014, Florida’s Senate Bill 1720 (SB 1720) initiated a major statewide developmental education reform in the Florida College System (FCS). Now that the reform has been underway for a few years, we use first-time-in-college (FTIC) students to examine three sets of indicators of student progress to understand the impacts of SB 1720: developmental education enrollment and passing rates, introductory college-level course enrollment and passing rates, and college-level credit hours attempted and earned during the first year of enrollment. For introductory college-level course passing rates, we present our results in two different ways. The first is a course-based passing rate, which is the number of students passing English or math courses divided by the total number of students enrolled in the course. The second measure is a cohort-based passing rate—the number of individuals passing the English or math courses divided by the total number of students in that cohort. We use data from Florida’s K-20 Education Data Warehouse (EDW), which tracks all Florida public school students remaining in-state from Kindergarten to postsecondary education. We include six-cohorts (fall 2011 to fall 2016) of FTIC student data from all 28 public state colleges in Florida. The key findings include: • Enrollment rates in developmental reading, writing, and math declined sharply following the reform. • Passing rates in developmental education courses remained relatively constant. • Enrollment rates in introductory college-level courses increased following the reform, most notably in math courses. • Course-based passing rates in English remained relatively stable over time, while course-based passing rates in intermediate algebra declined. • Cohort-based passing rates in English and math courses increased following the reform from a cohort-by-cohort comparative perspective. • Cohort-based passing rates for Black and Hispanic students increased at greater rates than White students. • Total first-year credit hours attempted and earned increased for all students following the reform. • Black and Hispanic students experienced a greater increase in college-level credits earned following the reform, compared to White students. In sum, since the implementation of the developmental education reform in Florida in fall of 2014, there has been an increase of student success as measured by introductory college-level course passing rates as measured as the share of students of each cohort who passed the courses and college-level credit hours attempted and earned during the first year of enrollment. The findings also point to the narrowing gaps in those measures for students of different racial/ethnic backgrounds. Overall, the developmental education redesign in Florida appears to have led to increased success and improved equity in the Florida College System.