Cloud County Community College is a small rural two-year college in north-central Kansas. The college serves a 12 county service area of over 8000 square miles, and is an open enrollment college. Over the years we have seen a shift in our enrollments, as more and more of our students come to the College requiring one or more developmental courses.

In fact, the vast majority of enrollments, roughly 92% during this past year, are for classes at or below the level of College Algebra. Our team was comprised of Tim Warkentin and Mark Whisler, and we felt that our focus should be on these classes. We wanted to learn more about how our students fared when they moved from their developmental courses to College Algebra. We also were concerned about College Algebra itself, and the format in which we should offer it.

 Historically, we have had the same problems as the rest of the nation in terms of student success in College Algebra. Thus, several years ago, a one credit course, Explorations in College Algebra, was instituted as an attempt at intervention. This course was required of all students who took College Algebra at our Concordia campus. It was designed and implemented as a series of activities, or "labs", in which the students used graphing calculators, often in groups, to examine certain topics in more detail.

The problem was that we didn't know if the course fulfilled one of its primary goals: to increase performance in College Algebra. That data had never been gathered. We also received complaints on a regular basis from students because they were required to take a course with little or no perceived benefit to them. And although this was beyond the scope of our project, this requirement may have led to decreases in enrollment in main campus daytime College Algebra classes. Thus one issue we decided to examine was trying to find the best format for our College Algebra classes.

This effort formed the largest part of our project, but was not our original idea. As mentioned above, we were interested in whether our developmental classes provided a good preparation for College Algebra, and this was the idea we presented in our initial meeting in San Diego. Being new to the world of assessment, we had trouble deciding how we were going to measure this, and even what we were going to measure. We were asked to refine this idea, and this is when we came up with our project in College Algebra. This, then, gives a broad outline of what we were trying to accomplish.

Since one member of our team (Warkentin) was teaching the three daytime sections of College Algebra, this part of the project naturally fell to him. This fact was actually one of the primary reasons we chose this project, since we wouldn't have to worry about the effect of different instructors on any results. Since we were interested in finding the best format for the class, each section was delivered in a different format. One section met three days a week, with an Explorations laboratory that met once a week for one and a half hours. Another section met each day of the week, with the Tuesday-Thursday sections meeting for 45 minutes each, without any lab activities. The last section met three days a week, without any additional time or intervention.

In each of these sections, Tim used certain questions on multiple-choice tests throughout the course to measure student performance on course outcomes. What he found wasn't too surprising, except for the results from the final exam. The section that met each day performed the best on 6 of 7 exams. This result did not carry over to the final exam, and in fact this section had the worst performance on the final exam. The next best performance came from the section that met three times per week, and the section that met with the Explorations lab. This section performed best on the final, however.

As for a look at how we were preparing our students for College Algebra, Whisler dug into records, with the help of our Advisement office, and looked at the grades that students who took Intermediate Algebra received in College Algebra. This search went back through the past two years only, since we had a significant faculty turnover at that time.

Again, the findings confirmed at least one idea that we had anecdotal evidence for: that students who received a C in Intermediate Algebra typically struggled. In fact, they had about a 30% chance of earning a grade of C or better, which is how we defined success in the class. Another unsurprising result is that students who took Intermediate Algebra in the spring and went on to College Algebra in the fall were at a fairly high risk of not succeeding. Overall, 70% of our students who took Intermediate Algebra in this two-year period earned a C or better in College Algebra.

How, then, did we use this information? The change with the greatest impact is likely to be the change in format that we instituted in the fall of 2002 in College Algebra. We are offering all of our daytime sections of College Algebra as classes that, along with its companion class, College Algebra Explorations, meet every day. We plan to continue our evaluation of this format with a smaller set of outcomes, to see if it nets any gains in student performance. An idea for future consideration is early intervention of an unspecified type with students who took Intermediate Algebra in the spring and College Algebra in the fall, in order to improve their likelihood of success. We also plan to use some of these ideas in our assessment efforts of other classes.