Accelerated Learning Programs (ALP)

Abstract: Peter Adams, who initiated the ALP program at Community College of Baltimore County and has provided national leadership for ALP program development at other colleges, comments on common questions and concerns about ALP models.

Over the past ten years, two-year college writing programs have participated in a significant movement toward accelerated learning, designing and implementing a variety of Accelerated Learning Programs (ALPs). Created by Peter Adams at the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) in 2007, ALP invites students who have been placed into remediation to enroll concurrently in two linked courses taught by the same instructor: an upper-level developmental writing class and a credit-bearing first-year writing course.

This link will take you to an online ALP Sourcebook posted by Jamey Gallagher from the Community College of Baltimore County:

Community colleges are the point of entry to higher education for the majority of nation’s first generation, minority and low-income students. But there is a harsh reality that these students may not understand when they receive their English and Math placement results: the more semesters of remedial courses a student is required to take, the more remote that student’s chances of passing college-level Math or English and being eligible to transfer or earn a degree.

Let me begin by stating unequivocally that I, along with many others in the field of postsecondary education, support the thoughtful and holistic implementation of the original Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC) Accelerated Learning Program model (ALP) as studied by the Community College Research Center (CCRC) in 2010 (Jenkins et al., 2010) and 2012 (Cho et al., 2012).

This paper documents the perceptions and experiences of faculty members in the midst of statewide reform efforts in Virginia and North Carolina to integrate developmental reading and writing courses. Using interview and focus group data from 161 faculty and administrators in both states (combined) as well as three detailed case studies of faculty teaching newly integrated courses, we describe how departments and faculty approached the task of course integration

Increased Pass Rated for Developmental Courses Resulting from Organizational Change, by the Higher Learning Commission

(Can't find a good link for this article.)

http://cop.hlcommission.org/Learning-Environments/lonergan.html

ALP was developed to address the low success rates of developmental writing students at CCBC by creating small cohorts of developmental students coenrolled in the college-level composition course along with a companion course taught by the same instructor. Several quantitative studies have demonstrated improved outcomes for ALP students at CCBC compared to students who took the traditional sequence of developmental writing.