Credit recovery is education’s Faustian pact. We remain not very good at raising most students to respectable standards. But neither can we refuse to graduate boxcar numbers of kids who don’t measure up. Enter credit recovery, an opaque, impressionistic, and deeply unsatisfying method of merely declaring proficient getting at-risk kids back on track for graduation.
This pair of studies from the American Institutes for Research and the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research looks at more than 1,200 ninth graders in seventeen Chicago public schools who were enrolled in a credit recovery course the summer after failing algebra I a few years ago. Half took the class online, half in face-to-face classes. Providing credit recovery is now one of the most common purposes of online courses; but “evidence of the efficacy of online credit recovery is lacking,” the authors note with considerable understatement.
The first report analyzes the role of in-class mentors in online classrooms, examining whether students benefited from their additional instructional support. They did—kind of. The authors suggest that “instructionally supportive mentors” (those with subject matter expertise, not just a warm body providing “support”) lead to students navigating the course with greater depth and less breadth. They seem not to have considered that out-of-subject mentors may have simply helped in the only way they knew how—by encouraging students to push through more of the material. Regardless, whether students took the online class or the face-to-face version, “multiple measures of algebra learning were low for students in both the face-to-face and online classes, suggesting little evidence of content recovery in the context of their credit recovery courses.” Right.
The second brief takes a longer view, looking not only at how the students who failed algebra I performed in online versus face-to-face credit recovery classes, but also at the much more critical question of where these students stood a year later. A strong majority of both groups successfully “recovered” their lost credit (66 percent of online students versus 76 percent who took face-to-face courses), but students who took the online course generally found it to be more difficult. They also were more likely to have a negative attitude about math than students who took the live class (perhaps because it was more difficult?). Online students also posted significantly lower grades: In order to earn credit, students needed to earn a D or better. More than half (53 percent) of students in the face-to-face Chicago classes earned an A, B, or C, compared to only 31 percent of the online students. A whopping 36 percent of online learners—the biggest chunk—squeaked by with a D. That isn’t an entirely black mark on the online course and teachers, who may be more clear-eyed and less emotionally swayed by students who are not physically sitting in front of them. Critically—and this is the good news—the authors found that there were no significant differences between online and face-to-face students in how they performed in subsequent math classes or their likelihood of being on track for graduation a year later. It’s also the bad news.
For at-risk, low-achieving students, the pair of studies provides important cautions about online credit recovery—and the practice generally. The authors suggest that online credit recovery course models offering more instructional support and opportunities for remediation of earlier content would benefit at least some students who fail regular classes. But as the authors correctly observe, their work “raises questions” about the balance between remediation and rigor in credit recovery. “Instruction that matches students’ skill levels may not correspond well with the expectations for the content of the courses required for high school graduation or college readiness, especially within the constricted timeframe of a summer course.”
Our deal with the devil remains in full effect.
SOURCE: Jessica Heppen et al., “Getting Back on Track: Comparing the Effects of Online and Face-to-Face Credit Recovery in Algebra I,” American Institutes for Research (April 2016); and Suzanne Taylor et al., “Getting Back on Track: The Role of In-Person Instructional Support for Students Taking Online Credit Recovery,” American Institutes for Research (April 2016).
