As one of our development day events last week, we held a session concerning CoReq-ing (including a delightful and informative presentation by Dr. Sonya Armstrong), so I thought I’d take a moment to share a few thoughts about my relationship to HB 2223.
First, I must ask you to resist the temptation to write “co-wrecking,” even though that is the pronunciation. In fact, for reasons I will explain, I think — however we got here — CoReq-ing is good for student success. But before we get to that, what’s HB 2223 all about?
Essentially, HB 2223 mandates two things: (1) a phased requirement that a percentage of developmental education students enroll in developmental courses co-requisite with college credit courses, and (2) a reduction in reimbursable hours for developmental education from 18 to 12 credit hours per student. These two mandates — plus the recent decision to lower the “cut score” for the TSI — are, let’s say, transformative changes to our implementation of dev ed.
Thanks to the INRW faculty, who are not newcomers to pairing dev ed and college credit courses, we are ahead of schedule on meeting the first mandate, which gives us a bit of breathing room to pause and reflect on what we’re doing. I’ll save discussion of implementation for another post.
For this installment, I’d like to focus on the opportunity HB 2223 gives us to think about contextualized learning. There’s a lot of research pointing to something we may have already known: People acquire and master skills more quickly when those skills are — wait for it — applied to real problems. For example, you could learn to tie your shoes by looking at a diagram, but it will be a lot faster if you learn by tying the shoes you’re putting on for your morning walk, with a bit of instruction and coaching (and encouragement). That sort of thing.
In one study, for instance, nursing students mastered certain algebra skills more quickly (and retained them longer) when they learned the stills in the context of pharmacology (where skills like diluting solutions to certain percentages can mean the difference between staying alive and not), rather than a math class. Don’t get me wrong: I love math. But for the most part, in math classes, “death by algebra” is almost always a metaphor. You get the idea.
Well, it turns out that a mandate to CoReq is actually a mandate to contextualize learning, applied to college-level reading and writing. Like learning to tie your shoes, the basic idea is that you will learn to read and write more efficiently when you read and write to complete something else you want, like credit for a college course.
Realizing that HB 2223 is really about contextualized learning was my first step on the road to love — and better still, we already know how to do it. But I also realized that we don’t have to stop with the mandate. Sure, we’re going to meet the state mandate and all, and along the way, we’re going to learn how to CoReq effectively. But we could also look for ways to leverage what we learn to boost student success in other ways. That’s when I really started to love HB 2223.
For instance, we could CoReq ESOL courses with college credit: What better way for people who want to master English so they can succeed in college than to get into college courses?
ESOL and credit pairs are a very close analogy of dev ed and credit, but we could go further. What about a seriously hair-brained pair, like Comp I and II and Spanish I and II? That might be “out there,” but think about how many people say that they don’t really understand the mechanics of their mother tongue until they try to learn someone else’s? That could be pretty cool. (Or not.)
The “Or not” brings me to an important point about CoReq-ing: It raises a lot of questions. Actually, it should raise a lot of questions, but it’s best if it raises the questions before we commit to answers. So, up next: Let’s talk about data.
