Remediation rates drop for CSU students

Students who enter the California State University system may now be better prepared for college than in previous years, according to statistics from the Chancellor's Office.

The recent drop in the percentage of freshmen needing remedial education in the CSU shows that math and English skills may be on the increase. Officials said that about 48 percent of freshmen entering the CSU in the fall of 1999 needed remediation in math, a six percent decrease from the fall of 1998, and 46 percent needed remediation in English, a one percent decrease from the year before.

At Fresno State, fall 1999 figures for first-time freshmen needing math remediation dropped 7 percent from the 1998 figures, while English remediation did not show a decline.

The figures were released at a meeting of the CSU's governing board of trustees in San Jose earlier this month.

Provost J. Michael Ortiz believes students are beginning to realize Fresno State is serious about its standards. Ortiz credited the recent decline in remediation to intervention programs and students' knowledge of the new standards.

Students entering Fresno State must pass the Entry Level Mathematics Test (ELM) and the English Placement Test (EPT).

The university is working with local high schools in order to boost student performance on these tests.

"As part of our intervention efforts, Fresno State is collaborating with selected area high schools to establish learning assistance programs and faculty-to-faculty alliances in both mathematics and English," said Dr. Patricia Hart, assistant to the provost for special projects.

The Central California Collaborative Aca-demic Preparation Initiatives (CCCAPI) Project was created as part of a systemwide effort to reduce the number of entering students needing remediation and to build partnerships with K-12 schools. The project, administered through the Office

of the Provost, is designed to strengthen the professional relationships between university and high school faculty and to increase the alignment between high school standards and CSU expectations.

The districts participating in this project - Fresno Unified, Clovis Unified, and Sanger Unified - are making major efforts to collaborate with the university.

The mathematics component of the project serves eight area schools in all three districts and uses two different approaches to address the needs of regional high school seniors who plan to attend Fresno State but may have difficulty passing the ELM. Both approaches include work in algebra, geome-try, and probabilitys/statistics - the areas tested by the ELM.

"Early Start" is an intensive 10-week program that focuses on seniors who have not yet completed algebra II. "Fine Tune" is a shorter, three-week math refresher course for seniors who need practice and review.

Intensive workshops are being jointly developed at seven area high schools to help students understand and pass the CSU English Placement Test (EPT). In addition, university faculty members are working with teachers at two high schools to prepare students whose native language is not English.

"One example is the Reading/Writing Center at Fresno High School, which is modeled after Fresno State's center," Hart said. "The Center staff and our faculty meet regularly with the high school English teachers and tutors to develop appropriate programs for students."

While preliminary figures on the project's impact are not yet available, CCCAPI Project collaborators said they anticipate both a reduction in need for remediation and an increase in intersegmental cooperation.

Hart, who directs the project, believes that aligning high school standards and university requirements through long-range collaboration will have the greatest influence on student success or failure.