Ideas in Practice: Science Courses in Developmental Education

If asked to name some components of a developmental education program, educators might mention reading/writing courses, courses, Supplemental Instruction, tutoring, advising, career counseling, or any number of other programs and services designed to help underprepared and at-risk students succeed in postsecondary education (Maxwell, 1994,1997). However, the words probably would not come to mind. None of the sessions offered at developmental education conferences such as the meetings of the National Association for Development Education (NADE) and the College Reading and Learning Association (CRLA) are concerned with science courses or student achievement in science. Furthermore, through our professional associations, we are not aware of a single developmental education program in the United States that includes a science course as part of its curriculum. Some university science departments do offer preparatory science courses to be taken by students prior to the standard introductory science course. However, these are all designed specifically to help students succeed in a particular subsequent science course, as opposed to university courses in general.Presumably, the absence of science courses from developmental education comes from the view that students must have a firm grounding in reading, writing, and mathematics skills before they can succeed in a science course. We believe that this is not the case. In our view, science courses can be an important component of a developmental education program when they are structured in such a way as to help students develop the skills and attitudes necessary for success in postsecondary education, including skills in reading, writing, and mathematics. Over the past several years, we have been teaching such science classes at a college designed to help underprepared students succeed at a large, urban research university in the upper Midwest (Jensen & Rush, 2000; Johnson, 2001; Miller, Brothen, Hatch, & Moen, 1988). These classes span a wide range of science disciplines, including biology, chemistry, environmental science, geology, human anatomy and physiology, physics, and meteorology.The General College (GC) at the University of Minnesota accepts students who would otherwise have been denied admission to the university based on low test scores. These students are approximately 50% male and 50% female, with 46% of them students of color. Their mean composite ACT score is 19.8, and their mean high school percentile rank is 53 (General College, 2004). The GC mission is to provide these students with an academically rigorous curriculum including courses that teach both disciplinary content and academic study skills and to transfer them to regular university degree programs prepared to tackle those programs' challenging requirements.In this paper, we discuss how the science courses at the General College perform double duty: both contributing to the preparation of students for further university work and serving as laboratories in which ideas on how to help prepare at-risk students can be tested and refined.Why Teach Developmental Science Courses?If both developmental reading, writing, and mathematics courses and our developmental science courses are designed to prepare students for future coursework, why add science to the traditional curriculum? Although reading, writing, and mathematics courses provide a level of instruction in those basic skills that cannot be matched by a science course, developmental science courses help prepare students in other ways that cannot be duplicated by a reading, writing, or mathematics course. We describe several of these methods in the following paragraphs.Skills Practice within a Disciplinary ContextThe goal of traditional reading, writing, and mathematics courses is to give students a solid foundation in those skills that they can then apply in future courses to help them succeed. …