DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

Developmental Education in Higher Education Institutions

Developmental Education in Higher Education Institutions

Introduction

Developmental education incorporates a wide range of interventions designed to help underprepared students be successful in higher education. These interventions include tutoring programs, special academic advising and counseling programs, learning laboratories, and comprehensive learning centers. They also include developmental courses which represent the intervention most commonly used in higher education.

Developmental courses are found in over 90% of the nation's community colleges and about 70% of our universities (Boylan et al, 1992). Learning assistance centers tend to be the favored intervention at research universities. However, there are many examples where both developmental courses and learning assistance centers are provided at community colleges and universities.

Discussion Among the meanings of develop are to evolve the possibilities of...to promote the growth of Development is defined as the act, process, or result of developing. Remedy, meanwhile, refers to a medicine, application, or treatment that relieves or cures a disease ... something that corrects or counteracts an evil. To remedy is to provide or serve as a remedy for. Synonyms are cure and correct. The definition of remedial has been expanded to not only include intended as a remedy, by more specifically, concerned with the correction of faulty study habits and the raising of a pupil's general competence.

How do we want to define ourselves? Is our mission to promote the growth of students to their highest potential, or the correct a previous wrong? As Payne and Lyman point out, the answer to this question has significant political and budgetary ramifications as well as considerations for how we perceive ourselves as educators.

Seven Vectors of College Student Development

Chickering's (1969) seven vectors of college student development have withstood the test of time. Perhaps the most significant addition to the second edition (Chickering & Reisser, 1993) is the recognition that a theory originally written to address the developmental needs of the traditionally age college students of the 1960s can be equally pertinent to students of all ages in the 1990s. Although some of the terminology has changed, the vectors remain remarkably the same.

Developing Competence

This vector includes intellectual, physical and manual, and interpersonal (previously termed social) competence. Reisser (1995) describes three areas of intellectual competence:

The acquisition of subject matter knowledge, and of skills tied directly to academic programs.

The growth of intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic sophistication, expanding interests in humanities, performing arts, philosophy, and history, and increasing involvement in lifelong learning.

Changes in ways of knowing and reasoning; the development of skills like critical thinking and reflective judgement; and increasing ability to locate and use new information, to analyze objectively and draw conclusions from data, to solve problems, to generate questions and answers, to communicate proposals and opinions, and to develop new frames of reference.

Developmental educators can make significant contributions to student growth in intellectual competence. By engaging students more actively in the learning process, whether through cooperative learning ventures lithe that described by Myers, modeling behaviors and scaffolding as delineated by Caverly ...