The Mobile Fact and Concept Textbook System (MoFaCTS) is an individualized online tutoring system designed to increase information comprehension and retention. It is being implemented in community college anatomy and physiology (A&P) courses for further system development. A&P was selected because it is a very challenging and highly in…

In 2017, the California State Legislature and governor adopted new law that fundamentally disrupted the long-held practice of remedial (or developmental) education in the California Community Colleges (CCCs). The law, Assembly Bill 705, was preceded by earlier reforms that changed how colleges could place students into remedial education, or basic…

Supporting Strategic Writers (SSW) is an instructional approach and curriculum for college developmental English and integrated reading and writing courses. SSW is based on strategy instruction integrated with practices common in college English. Students learn strategies for writing and critical reading of sources based on rhetorical analysis and…

Using rich administrative data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office that tracks each student longitudinally, this analysis examines how the onset of the pandemic affected student enrollment duration. Data are disaggregated by student characteristics and college campuses in order to understand variable impacts and equity…

One frequently cited yet understudied channel through which funding levels impact college students is course availability--colleges are often forced to respond to budgetary pressure by reducing course offerings. We provide the first causal evidence on this mechanism at a community college, using administrative course registration data and a novel…

Only 11% of community college (associate's-degree) students transfer vertically and obtain a bachelor's degree within six years, despite over 80% originally intending to do so. These leaks in the transfer pipeline disproportionately affect students from underrepresented groups, who are more likely to attend community colleges and to leak out of…

The Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE) and the state's 28 public colleges and universities have collaborated over the last fifteen years to make easier and more transparent the process of transferring from a community college to a bachelor's degree program in one of the state's public colleges or universities. In this report, we…

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are an increasingly common research design for evaluating the effectiveness of community college (CC) interventions. However, when planning an RCT evaluation of a CC intervention, there is limited empirical information about what sized effects an intervention might reasonably achieve, which can lead to under- or…

The last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) conducted in community colleges. Yet, there is limited empirical information on the design parameters necessary to plan the sample size for RCTs in this context. We provide empirical estimates of key design parameters, discussing lessons based on the pattern…

Food insecurity is widespread among college students in the United States. CalFresh food benefits, known federally as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, can help students in California pay for food, but may not reach all eligible students. CalFresh enrollment rates among students have been difficult to estimate due to…

In two studies, we explored the associations among situational reading-related competence beliefs and task value, inference strategies, comprehension during reading, and foundational skills in college age students. In Study 1, 93 participants from a community college completed assessments of comprehension and two types of inference strategies…

While research has documented outcomes for students served by promise programs, few studies have considered the behavior of institutions themselves in the promise era. A new source of revenue combined with larger and more diverse cohorts is likely to motivate changes in spending and staffing--decisions instrumental to student access and success.…

Randomized control trials (RCTs) have long been considered the "gold standard" for evaluating the impacts of interventions. However, in most education RCTs, the sample of schools included is recruited based on convenience, potentially compromising a study's ability to generalize to an intended population. An alternative approach is to…

As college promise programs proliferate across the United States with noted intentions to promote access through increased affordability, it is necessary to understand the relationship between these programs and other forms of financial aid, including loans. Using federal, state, and program-level data, we leverage a natural experiment to estimate…

This longitudinal study of 17,455 students, the majority from underrepresented groups, investigated leaks in the vertical transfer pipeline from associate's-degree program entry to bachelor's-degree receipt. Investigated were both the size of the leaks and some associated variables. Pipeline progress examinations included quantification of early…