Sorted out: Remedial ed doesn’t prepare students
Remedial courses usually fail to prepare students for college-level work, concludes a study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research. “Remediation does not develop students’ skills sufficiently to increase their rates of college success,” concludes Judith Scott-Clayton, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College, who wrote the paper with graduate student Olga Rodriguez.
Still, the remedial track may have other uses: At open-access colleges, the remedial track can be a low-cost way of sorting unprepared students out of crowded college-level courses, the paper suggests:
Still, the remedial track may have other uses: At open-access colleges, the remedial track can be a low-cost way of sorting unprepared students out of crowded college-level courses, the paper suggests:
. . . an unadvertised but implicit function of remedial assignment may be to signal students about their likelihood of college completion; it may be efficient to both the student and the institution to realize this and adjust their investments sooner rather than later.
Moreover, regardless of its effectiveness in remediating skill deficiencies, remediation may still serve as an expedient form of student tracking. Even if remediated students never make it to