Proposed Topic Area

I have chosen to concentrate on effective practices that promote college readiness among high school students but as result of further research, I have encountered two additional topic areas that I am currently considering. One would focus on addressing how work-based learning in the community college environment would impact college persistence and completion, given that past research has demonstrated a correlation between experiential learning and graduation rates among high school students. For example, in a concerted effort to understand the high school drop out crisis from the student’s perspective the Gates Foundation surveyed young people ages 16-25 who identified themselves as high school dropouts in 25 different locations in the U.S., including New York. According to the survey 81% of the respondents said, “that if schools provided opportunities for real-world learning (internships, service-learning, and other opportunities), it would have improved their chances of graduating from high school.” Thus, engaging students and making school more relevant to their lives not only helps reduce high school attrition but also aligns with students needs towards improving their chances of academic and professional success. I would like to take this topic and explore how this may impact retention within community colleges, where retention rates are significantly lower in comparison to four-year colleges.
In addition, a recently came across a report titled “Improving Undergraduate Learning: Finding and Policy Recommendations from the SSRC-CLA Longitudinal Project” for one of my classes and there have been some interesting questions that have raised with regards to quality of higher education and how it works to instill critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication. According to the report, “over four years, only 50 percent of students reported that they had taken five or fewer courses that required 20 pages of writing over the course of the semester”, which demonstrates reduced rigor in academic coursework and may signal the effects of oversized classrooms and how quality of instruction may have seen itself affected by the pressure of student’s demands and teacher evaluations. I would like to further examine how the quality of higher education has changed and the factors that have caused a change in academic rigor and expectations.