Persistence And Successful Course Completion Of Academically Underprepared Community College Students In The P.A.S.S. Program

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Date

2015

Department

Community College Leadership Program

Program

Doctor of Education

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This item is made available by Morgan State University for personal, educational, and research purposes in accordance with Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Other uses may require permission from the copyright owner.

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Abstract

According to Bailey and Cho (2010), addressing the needs of students in developmental education is perhaps the most difficult and most important problem facing community colleges. The P.A.S.S. Summer Bridge and Support program at a suburban community college is designed to address those needs. The purpose of this comparative quantitative study, using a secondary data set, was to examine the differences in persistence and successful course completion of developmental and college-level credit courses of students who participated in the P.A.S.S. Summer Bridge and Support Program at a mid-size suburban community college. This study compared the fall-to-spring and fall-to-fall persistence rates and successful course completion during three consecutive years between the two groups. This study found no statistically significant differences, p < .05 level of significance, between P.A.S.S. participants and eligible non- P.A.S.S. students in fall-to-spring persistence or fall-to-fall persistence. The research revealed no statistically significant differences between P.A.S.S. participants and non- P.A.S.S. students in successfully passing college-level credit courses. However, the study did find statistically significant differences between P.A.S.S. participants and non-P.A.S.S. students in successfully passing developmental writing courses in the 2012 cohort year and in developmental math during the 2013 cohort year. In addition, several other noteworthy observations were revealed by the descriptive statistics that illustrated potential trends in the data which highlighted differences between the academic outcomes of the P.A.S.S. participants and the non-P.A.S.S. students.