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Objective/Research Question: Surprisingly, little research explores the literacy practices specific to career technical education (CTE) courses at the postsecondary level, yet the number of students coming to college needing literacy support continues to increase. There is a need for focused research on what constitutes college-readiness. The study described in this article addresses this overarching issue by exploring the text expectations, including text types, tasks, and goals in both CTE courses and developmental reading (DR) courses to determine whether, how, and to what extent text expectations align across the DR and CTE courses. Methods: This multisite research project involved three community colleges in one Midwestern state. Data sources included surveys, focus groups, and textbooks for all courses. Data collection procedures were comparable for each type of data, across all study sites, focal tracks, and constituency groups.

Results: This study's findings suggest a lack of alignment between the DR courses and the introductory-level CTE courses, on a number of levels. Conclusions/Contributions: This study's findings suggest a need to continue investigating what constitutes college-ready for reading, across multiple disciplinary and career technical areas.

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While new community colleges proliferated across the nation during the 1950s and 1960s, Indiana's postsecondary educational leaders pursued an alternative route to expanding educational opportunity during the postwar years through extension campuses. The study reported in this article draws on archival documents to gain an understanding of the rationale and motivations for opposing community college development in Indiana during the 1950s and the 1960s. Two research questions guided this analysis. First, how did state and educational leaders frame the issues, problems, and alternatives related to the expansion of post-high school educational opportunities? Second, why did policy actors in Indiana choose strategies different from those selected by most other states?

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The aim of this article is to orient those interested in adult community college student research to a wide array of discourses and theoretical tools that can help us understand the underlying complexity of the problems faced by this often-marginalized group. Reviewed are categories of theory about student involvement and engagement, student development, and adult learning that should inform how we educate adult community college students. This article concludes with a discussion of how all these theories, taken together, can improve adult education in community colleges.

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Researchers asked 17 participants in a job-training program to describe their personal struggles following an economic restructuring. Examined through a critical theoretical lens, findings indicate that the learners enrolled in the program to reclaim security, dignity, meaningful work, and caring relationships. Program planners at community colleges are therefore urged to employ democratic program planning models, ask learners about their educational needs as they see them, and listen compassionately to their responses.

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Arthur M. Cohen and his colleagues at the Center for the Study of Community Colleges have made significant and broad contributions to the scholarly literature and empirical research about community colleges. Although Cohen’s interests are comprehensive and his writings touch on multiple issues associated with community colleges, his empirical work is particularly important in three areas: curriculum, transfer, and faculty. This article provides an overview of the work Cohen and his colleagues have conducted in these areas.

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Seven urban and rural community colleges in the United States and Canada were examined using a qualitative multiple-case-study design to define changes in the colleges' institutional missions during the 1990s. Group site visits, personal interviews with administrators and faculty, and policy documents provided the data, which were analyzed using an analytical framework drawn from globalization literature. Two iterations of pattern coding and content analysis identified specific themes and patterns in documents, interviews, and observations. Observational data also provided support for emerging patterns. Although most of the interviewees perceived little change in their institutions' missions during the 1990s, the data collected indicated alterations to mission based on global economic concerns. The author summarizes the mission changes at each college and suggests that a new globally oriented vocationalism dominated the community college mission at the end of the twentieth century.

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This study examines student learning experiences in nine occupational education programs at two Midwestern community colleges. Interviews with 39 program graduates and 10 of their supervisors provided information about the features of the occupational programs that were most beneficial for job preparation, those that were least beneficial for job preparation, and the extent to which the occupational programs prepared students to keep learning on their own after graduation.

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Objective: Beyond understanding whether first-year student success interventions in community colleges are effective - for which there is mixed evidence in the literature - this study's purpose was to uncover how they work to realize observed outcomes, including at times unanticipated undesirable outcomes. Method: This qualitative multiple case study used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to unpack interactions and tensions among programmatic-level features and individual-level experiences and actions. We conducted classroom observation, document analysis, and interviews with instructors and students in four student success courses across diverse contexts.

Results: Regardless of particular designs and course emphases, we found in all cases a blurring of activity elements, wherein learning tools and learning goals were often coterminous, or instructors effectively took on the role of learning tools themselves, in the form of object lessons and mediators, for instance. Courses had a distinctive character as rehearsal for college that simultaneously created a welcoming peer environment but an uncertain learning and assessment environment. Contributions: Because of their nature as metacourses - college courses about college-going - success courses' means and ends ultimately may be functionally inseparable, thus helping to explain their continual evolution and contested roles. Whereas such courses are typically justified as means to teach college skills, we found this utilitarian rationale to be insufficient to describe the experiential dimensions of social learning that participants reported. Instead, we found these courses reveal how college-going is an emergent social literacy, one that a single course is insufficient to fully realize.

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This review of literature focuses on learning communities, which are defined as the deliberate restructuring of curriculum in order to build a community of learners among students and faculty. Learning communities began appearing in the curricular selections of two- and four-year colleges across the US from the beginning of the 1990s. Learning communities restructure course units by developing interdisciplinary connections that involve faculty and students in sustained academic relationships over a longer period of time than in traditional course settings. Teachers become more aware of student learning styles and needs and students develop a better awareness of their peers’ learning styles. The author examines the pedagogical foundations and definitions of learning communities and their impact in relation to the community college mission, faculty, and students. Existing programs are also discussed along with suggestions for implementation. The author concludes that a decade of research on learning communities demonstrates benefits in student retention, student satisfaction with classes, increased student success, and intellectual development. Feedback from teachers reveals a high level of satisfaction and professional development from teaching in a learning community. Show less

This design research project developed and evaluated curriculum for developmental writing classes in community colleges. The core of the curriculum was self-regulated strategy instruction, which has been shown to be effective with adolescents who are struggling as writers. In the curriculum, students learned strategies for planning, drafting, and revising compositions with an emphasis on using knowledge of text organization to guide planning and self-evaluation. In addition to specific writing strategies, students learned strategies for self-regulation. The study is part of a project that developed two levels of developmental writing courses, but only the lower level course is addressed in this article. This article reports findings from the first two cycles of implementation and revision. Over two semesters, the curriculum was implemented in eight classes taught by three instructors and revised after an analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. Substantial gains in writing achievement and motivation were found, especially in the second cycle. In addition to successes, the article discusses design challenges for the curriculum and professional development.

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