Remedial Education

Remedial education, also known as developmental or basic education, provides instruction to individuals—typically children, adolescents, and adults—who struggle with fundamental skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics. This educational approach seeks to address the gap between students’ current competencies and the skills necessary for success in higher education and the workforce. In the United States, a significant proportion of first-year college students enroll in remedial courses, often due to a lack of fluency in core subjects. Despite various educational reforms aimed at improving student outcomes since the 1960s, many students still leave high school without mastering essential skills, leading to a persistent need for remedial education.

Factors contributing to this ongoing issue include insufficient prior educational experiences, the complexity of reading comprehension, and the challenges faced by teachers in effectively delivering instruction. Additionally, non-native English speakers often require remedial support to develop language fluency. While remedial education is primarily associated with community colleges, it is also present in high schools and even elementary schools. The effectiveness of remedial programs has been questioned, prompting discussions on how educational practices can better support diverse learners and improve overall student achievement. Understanding these dynamics is key for educators and policymakers striving to enhance educational equity and student success.

Published in: 2021

By: Glenn, Hugh

Subject Terms

Remedial Education

Abstract

This article reviews the need for remedial education, and why it has yielded limited results. Remedial education, also known as basic education or developmental education, refers to instruction provided to children, adolescents, and adults who lack fluency in reading, writing, mathematics, and other skills. Selected factors that account for the large number of students who leave high school not having learned basic skills are discussed, as well as what teachers need to know to present more effective instruction in reading, mathematics, and writing. Remedial education does not represent a short-term trend in the United States. Each year, many first-year college students must enroll in a remedial reading class, a remedial mathematics class, or in a remedial writing class. The magnitude of the need for remedial education may be greater than generally recognized because many first-year college students avoid enrolling in remedial classes despite their lack of fluency in basic skills.

Overview

Students in public schools throughout the United States have not shown significant improvement in reading or mathematics since the first National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) in 1969. Referred to as "The Nation's Report Card," NAEP assesses student performance of thousands of students periodically in a wide range of subjects including reading, mathematics, writing, science, and U.S. history. The majority of individuals who have received remedial education have lacked fluency in reading, mathematics, or writing fluency or a combination of these basic skills. The term remedial reading currently more often refers to adults than to children, and particularly to first-year college students, who often lack fluency in the 3 R's.

Upon college enrollment, the skills of these students are often tested to measure reading comprehension, mathematical understanding computational skills, and writing proficiency. Many first-year college students are subsequently required to enroll in remedial reading and reading mathematics classes. Between 2003 and 2009, 68 percent of college students starting at a public two-year institution and 40 percent of those starting at a public four-year institution reported taking at least one remedial course (National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). Studies by the National Center for Education Statistics (2005b) have consistently found that public 2-year colleges have offered more remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics than other types of higher education institutions. A study by Shulock and Moore (2007) found that approximately 40 percent of first-time students in California community colleges who were not enrolled in a degree or certificate program were enrolled in courses to improve basic skills, job skills, or for personal enrichment. The wave of immigrants entering the United States since 1965 has resulted in millions more needing remedial education, particularly for developing fluency in speaking and reading English. The US Census Bureau has projected that immigration will increase the US population from 300 million in 2007 to 400 million in fewer than 50 years.

Remedial education lacks any specific definition. From the 1860s through the early 1960s, remedial education usually referred to a lack of achievement in reading, writing, or mathematics and to educational programs that provided instruction in these basic skills (Arendale, 2005). Since then, developmental education has been the preferred term and more frequently associated with college-age students. Remedial education is most commonly found in colleges, particularly in community colleges, although remedial instruction, usually remedial reading, is also taught in high schools and elementary schools. The National Center for Education Statistics (2005a) defines remedial reading as "instruction for a student lacking those reading, writing, or math skills necessary to perform college-level work at the level required by the attended institution" (NCES, 2005, p. 735). An increasing proportion of individuals receiving remedial education lack English fluency. Thus, remedial education is often taught by ESL teachers (teachers of English as a second language) or by ESOL teachers (teachers of English to speakers of other languages).

Educational Reforms in the United States. Many instructional, administrative, and legal reforms have been used to minimize the need for remedial education. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, created to assist children from low-income homes, was based upon the assumption children living in poverty needed more educational services than children from affluent homes. Head Start, part of ESEA, has provided education to 3- and 4-year-old children from low-income families to prepare preschool children to succeed in school. Special funding, often referred to as Title I, has allocated billions of federal dollars to assist educationally deprived children in low-income areas. This hope that a better education would eliminate poverty and increase academic performance was challenged by the Coleman Report (1966). This study concluded that student achievement was not markedly affected by improving such factors as the quality of teachers, changing school curricula, improving school buildings, or requiring children and adolescents to attend school.

After studying the American education system, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published an alarming report, A Nation at Risk in 1983. This study found that 23 million American adults were functionally illiterate in reading, writing, and comprehension and that student achievement in the United States was lower than in other industrialized nations. By severely criticizing the nation's elementary and secondary schools, major educational reforms were enacted including increasing the number of laws that affected education legislation, increasing financial allocations for education, elevating high school graduation requirements, decreasing class size, changing requirements for teacher licensure (certification), and requiring teachers to pass competency examinations.

Another effort to effect national school reform in public schools was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, federal legislation that intensified the use of school accountability, standards-based curricula, mandatory annual yearly progress (higher yearly test scores), and the use of technology as the principal means for improving student performance in US public schools. In 2015, the NCLB was largely replaced by the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was designed to lessen federal influence over such educational policies by assigning the states the power to create their own systems for accountability.

Assessing the Need for Remedial Education. Since 1969, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) has assessed long-term changes in academic performance among students in US public and private schools. Selected students from grades 4, 8, and 12 are tested every four years in reading, mathematics, science, writing, U.S. history, civics, geography, and the arts. NAEP publishes findings related to school subjects and student populations (e.g., gender, grade, and race) in specific geographic regions, but it does not report the achievement of individual students or schools. Because NAEP has conducted assessments for several decades, it is possible to compare student achievement in reading and mathematics since the early 1970s. Although the national trend in reading performance has shown an increase in reading achievement for 9-year-olds-"students at age 13 show no significant improvement in recent years… . [and] at age 17, no measurable differences in [reading] performance were found between 1971 and 2004" for any reading assessment test used (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005, p. 9). Similar results have been found for mathematics achievement. The national trend in mathematics achievement reveals improvement for 9-year-olds and 13-year-old from 1973 to 2004, but mathematics scores for 17-year olds in 2004 did not differ significantly from the mathematics scores recorded in 1973.

Despite the implementation of a broad scope of educational reforms to increase student achievement since 1900, the use of different teaching methods, different instructional materials, and technology, particularly laptop computers, student achievement among high school students in US public schools has remained stable for several decades. During 2004–6, 76 percent of 4-year public institutions in the United States offered remedial services, and more than 99 percent of 2-year colleges provided remedial services (National Center for Education Statistics, 2005a, p. 309).

Why Remedial Education Yields Limited Results. Because so many students fail to make normal progress in reading, mathematics, and writing, each year the gap widens between their performance and the achievements of students of the same age and grade who record normal progress. There are many reasons that contribute to the failure to achieve normal progress. A lack of understanding about learning and language among teachers may constitute an important factor.

Fluent reading is a see-comprehend process, not a see-say-comprehend process. Recognizing words on a page of print depends upon the same perceptual skills process used to recognize a deer grazing in a meadow. To identify a deer does not require its observer to see it and pronounce its name to recognize it. To observe the deer or recognize the word deer is a see-comprehend process. It is not necessary to say words aloud to identify them, nor is necessary to change print to speech to comprehend what is written.

A reader's only goal is comprehension-making sense of print. The goal of reading is not to acquire phonemic awareness, learn how to divide words into syllables, identify long or short vowel sounds, or memorize 87 phonics rules. Reading for meaning requires interpreting ink marks and white space (what is seen on a page of print) and the nonvisual information or prior knowledge that readers bring to reading (Smith, 1996).

The importance of prior knowledge for comprehension cannot be overemphasized (Smith, 1996). This knowledge includes everything a person knows including knowledge about learning, knowledge about language, knowledge about reading, and knowledge about subject matter. Readers can read about only what they know.

Although the only goal in reading is comprehension or reconstructing meaning, meaning is not represented directly in print, in the same way the meaning of spoken words are not represented directly by sounds. The meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, paragraph, or story is always assigned (predicted) by the reader. And because readers assign meaning to print, comprehension is always relative to the reader's prior knowledge and to the information about a particular topic the reader knows before beginning to read. That's why 30 students in a literature class may assign 30 different meanings to the same passage; an acceptable practice for adults. Young children, however, are expected to read the same story and identify the meaning, although the author's intended meaning can seldom be determined.

Some teachers believe that the meaning of print or speech is self-evident to readers or listeners, the result of summing up the meaning of individual written or spoken words. Reading instruction that requires readers to read rapidly facilitates comprehension-and provides practice in minimizing the use of visual information and maximizing the use of non-visual information. Instruction that emphasizes slow reading, careful reading, or accurate reading, slows readers, interferes with comprehension, and prevents readers from improving reading fluency. Teachers of remedial reading almost always stress word recognition; i.e., identifying and pronouncing words based upon learning purported reading skills and phonic rules instead of reading rapidly for meaning. Print cannot be comprehended when read slowly; and in the same sense, speech is incomprehensive to listeners when words are spoken slowly. A teacher's lack of understanding about how reading works slows the progress of many readers receiving remedial education.

Undoubtedly, other factors contribute to a student's lack of progress and the subsequent need for remedial education. The following factors are seldom considered when planning remedial classes.

1. The majority of children who need the greatest amount of education, which includes the nation's poorest children, rarely receive any formal education before they enter school (Berliner, 2006). In fact, they receive more education at home and in their neighborhoods than at school. Children receive instruction at school approximately 30 hours each week during a 36-week school year; thus, during the academic year, children are at school 1,000 hours but at home 5,000 hours. Berliner concluded that improving school achievement first requires improving home and neighborhood environments within which children and adolescents spend most of their lives and within which they acquire the prior knowledge needed to learn new information.

2. Reading instruction in schools since the Pilgrims landed has been based upon the assumption that reading requires changing a written code (print) into sounds (speech) as a prerequisite for comprehension. Beginning readers need to learn that reading makes sense and that the goal is changing print to meaning, not changing print to sounds. This distinction has characterized the so-called "reading wars," with advocates for teaching phonics battling supporters of reading for meaning. A phonics approach teaches children to recode letters and letter combinations to sounds. Comprehension-centered reading instruction, or reading for meaning, focuses on teaching children to decode print to meaning, to make sense of written language.
3. Often, writing is taught by teachers who lack writing fluency and whose teacher preparation program did not provide "solid preparation or professional development for the teaching of writing" according to the National Commission on Writing for America's Families, Schools, and Colleges (2006, p. 29). This commission recommended "Statewide policy and standards should require that teacher preparation programs provide all prospective teachers with exposure to writing theory and practice" (p. 67). The lack of writing fluency is also attributable to the lack of writing that students do. Because students rarely write enough in school (or at home) to become fluent writers, in part because of the pressure teachers feel to increase student test scores as mandated by NCLB, the commission recommended doubling the amount of time students currently spend writing in school (p. 25).
4. Knowledge of mathematics requires more than memorizing multiplication tables (two times two equals four) and achieving accuracy in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. A study by the American Mathematical Society (Ewing, 1999) concluded that too few teachers understand mathematics or how to teach it effectively. Smith (2002) offers an engaging and novel treatise on mathematics. He argues that a glass wall separates the physical world from the world of mathematics, a world within which language differs markedly from the language used in the physical world, although both worlds often use the same words. Smith points out that although children learn to count, they may not understand the concept of number. He posits that the world of mathematics must be entered, explored, and used principally through reason and that only a few mathematical concepts are learned via the senses or spoken language.

We may think we are using clear and familiar language when we ask a child to add a pair of numbers, … but unless the child already understands what we are saying mathematically, the child will not understand what we are talking about (Smith, 2002, p. 32).

According to Smith, without improvement in the preparation of mathematics teachers, the "glass wall" will continue to block many children from entering and learning about the world of mathematics, and ultimately will lead to a continued demand for remedial education.

5. NCLB regarded education as recording high scores on achievement tests. This goal relegated teachers to providing instruction for preparing students to pass tests, an educational focus that received considerable criticism (Coles, 2003; Smith, 2003). Early evidence revealed that NCLB would likely fail to improve student performance. An analysis of NAEP test data collected in 25 states during 1990–2003 did not support the notion that NCLB would meet its principal goals (Nichols, Glass, & Berliner, 2005). No substantive evidence has been found that school testing and technology has resulted in any significant increase in student performance, and testing pressures have increased dropout rates and student retentions. A second study published by a different group of researchers at the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University (Nichols et al., 2005) concluded that the majority of schools throughout the United States would not achieve the Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) requirements mandated by NCLB. These researchers predicted that in 2014, the year of the full implementation of NCLB, 95 percent of US public schools would not meet AYP requirements. As of 2018, the impact of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the NCLB's successor, remained to be seen.

Improving the Outcomes of Remedial Education. Remedial education for improving the basic skills of reading, writing, or mathematics depends upon the use of prior knowledge for relating new information and the extent to which teachers understand how humans learn, how humans learn language, and how language works.

Many students do not improve in reading or learn new content because they cannot read incomprehensible textbooks or complete exercises in instructional materials that do not make sense to them. Failing course grades do not always evidence the lack of ability to learn but the inability to learn by reading. Using cloze tests, Bormuth (1975) found that if students could not insert approximately 50 percent of an author's exact words, they did not learn any new information from reading. As a rule of thumb, if readers cannot insert 50 percent of the author's exact words, it is highly likely that the textbook or reading is too difficult to use as a medium of instruction for learning new content. To determine the difficulty of instructional materials, teachers could construct cloze tests from course textbooks to ensure that students can read fast enough and can practice the most important reading activity: maximizing the use of what they know (nonvisual information) and minimizing the use of print (visual information).

Remedial education for improving the basic skills of reading, writing, or mathematics depends upon the teacher's skill in using students' prior knowledge for relating new information and providing comprehensive instructional materials. Reading instruction that helps readers process print rapidly helps them become more fluent. But instruction that slows readers interferes with reading and with improving reading fluency.

Terms & Concepts

Basic Education: The minimum number of years in school, courses completed, or the minimum skills learned.

Basic Skills: Reading, writing, and mathematics, often referred to as the 3R's.

Cloze Test: A tool used to determine the readability of text or to determine the match between the difficulty of text and students' reading fluency.

Decoding: In reading, to use print to comprehend; i.e., to go from a written code to meaning. Some teachers use this word to mean word recognition; i.e., pronouncing words.

Deep Structure: The meaning to which a code refers; for example, the deep structure of the word honesty is its meaning.

Developmental Education: Instruction provided principally to young adults to improve their fluency in reading, writing, or mathematics. This term, has also been applied to instruction provided to children to improve their basic skills. Also called Remedial Education.

High-Stakes Testing: The use of student scores on measures of school performance as the basis for educational decision making.

Learning Disabled: A label that refers to a person whose school achievement is below the normal range for the individual's age and grade.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB): Federal legislation enacted in 2002 to improve the academic performance of each child in US public schools. This law mandated adequate yearly progress by using accountability, high-stakes testing, standards-based curricula, and technology.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP): A federal testing program funded by the US Office of Education to assess student progress periodically in the nation's public schools in selected subjects (e.g., reading, writing, mathematics, science, US history).

Non-Visual Information: In reading, the prior knowledge that readers use to comprehend new content. Used concurrently with visual information; i.e., what readers see on a page of print, principally letters, white space, and punctuation marks.

Phonics: Rules that children are taught regarding the relationship between sounds and symbols (print) used to pronounce unfamiliar words. Teachers of phonics instruct children that the "a" in cake "says its letter name (ay)" and that an "e" following a vowel and a consonant is "silent."

Prior Knowledge: The information that a person has learned from instruction and through experience. Sometimes referred to as long-term memory, prior knowledge is information "stored" in the brain, although not always accessible. Making sense of language depends upon the use of prior knowledge. Comprehension results when one can relate new information to prior knowledge. If successful, learning occurs, and new knowledge can be remembered.

Reading Disabled: A label that refers to a person whose reading achievement is below the normal range for the individual's age and grade.

Reading Fluently: Reading that uses a maximum amount of nonvisual information (prior knowledge) and a minimum amount of visual information to comprehend text. Fluent reading is fast reading during which readers use approximately 80 percent nonvisual information and 20 percent visual information.

Reading for Meaning: Using reading to comprehend, to make sense of print, to reconstruct the author's meaning.

Recoding: In reading, to change a written code to a spoken code; i.e., the convert a word on a page of print to speech.

Remedial Education: Often referred to as basic education or developmental education, instruction provided principally to young adults to improve their fluency in reading, writing, or mathematics. This term, has also been applied to instruction provided to children to improve their basic skills.

Surface Structure: In language, the meaning represented by sounds in speech and by what is seen on a page of print in writing. The deep structure, or meaning, which the listener or reader seeks to decode (comprehend), resides in the brain of the speaker or author.

Visual Information: What readers see on a page of print, principally letters, white space, and punctuation marks.

Bibliography

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Remedial Education

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Subject Terms

Remedial Education

Abstract

Overview

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

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