More entering ECC college-ready

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

ELGIN — Stephanie DelaTorriente of South Elgin felt that her teachers at St. Charles North High School had gotten her pretty ready for college.

Now a freshman at Elgin Community College, 19-year-old DelaTorriente said she still is undecided what she wants to study. But she knew the placement exams she took before starting classes at the community college were important, she said.

And, she said, “I was really prepared. The high school teachers were like, ‘At college, you have to be more responsible,’ and I’ve definitely learned that coming here.”

But there just were a lot of things from the past four years of high school English classes she couldn’t remember, and her test scores originally placed her into a developmental English course her first semester at Elgin Community College.

Instead, DelaTorriente took part in the college’s English Summer Bridges program, a three-week English review course, and retested. She’s now in English 102.

“We reviewed a lot of things about English that would help us to get into a higher English class. It helped a lot,” she said.

Programs such as Summer Bridges are among the reasons that Elgin Community College says more high school graduates are coming to the school college-ready.

Students notably are more prepared for college out of high school than they were five years ago, according to data that ECC presented at the Alliance for College Readiness winter meeting last month at Elgin Community College.

But the majority of those students coming from high school still aren’t completely college-ready, and achievement gaps exist among minority students, according to that data. That’s something the community college intends to study in a planned ELL/Latino College Readiness Project, the alliance announced at the winter meeting.

“The trend is in the right direction,” said Lisa Wiehle, director of outcomes assessment at Elgin Community College.

“About 32 percent right now can proceed directly into college courses.”

That’s more than an eight-point jump over the past five years, when just 23.6 percent of students transitioning directly from high school to the community college did so without taking any “developmental” — or remedial — courses, according to data the Alliance for College Readiness has gathered over that time. That includes ACT and college placement exam scores.

The biggest jump in a single subject was in math: 37.3 percent of high school graduates now are ready for college-level math courses, compared to 28.8 in the 2005-06 school year. Wiehle said that growth was a good indicator because many students have a “phobia” of math, but the longer they put off taking college courses in the subject, the harder it becomes.

And Julie Schaid, the college’s assistant dean of college readiness and school partnerships, tied that jump to the alliance between Elgin Community College and its feeder school districts: Elgin School District U46, Carpentersville-based Community Unit School District 300, Burlington-based Central Community Unit School District 301 and St. Charles Community Unit School District 303.

Many high schools only require three years of math, and Schaid said, “One of the things we’re learning is a lot of students don’t necessarily take math their senior year of high school.” Alliance members from the community college have encouraged high school teachers to stress the importance of retaining those math skills to their students, she added.

Over the past five years, data show the number of students who can read at the college level (up from 73.2 in 2006 to 76.9 in 2010) and write at that level (56.7 in 2006, compared to 62.8 in 2010) has not only increased but slightly evened out. And Wiehle said those numbers are important for placement in a number of courses at the community college.

Michele Noel, an English instructor at Elgin Community College, said the alliance has been an eye-opening experience for her and for other English instructors at both the college and high school levels.

Many college professors never have taught at the high school level and dealt with “state testing, parents and all of that kind of stuff.”

“I think that really enhances our understanding,” Noel said. “In the past couple years, I think there’s been a better understanding of what we expect.”

For one, she said, she learned high school teachers had been preparing their students to graduate with the ability to score an 18 in writing on the ACT. Students must score at least a 20 to be considered ready for college-level writing at the community college, she said.

She’s also learned about teaching to different learning styles and using technology in her instruction. Those are things she said students coming from high school expect in the classroom — “things that 20 years ago I wasn’t doing.”

“I was sitting in front of a classroom and lecturing,” Noel said.

But despite the gains in college readiness made by students plus the mutual understanding among instructors and the success of programs such Summer Bridges, a notable achievement gap between white and Asian and black and Hispanic students still exists among incoming students at Elgin Community College.

Most notably, only about 10 percent of students who are black are coming from high school to ECC completely college ready. More than 50 percent of black students must complete developmental coursework in all three subjects, compared to about 30 percent of Hispanic students and about 10 percent of both white and Asian students.

The growing population of Hispanic students at Elgin Community College is one group that the alliance plans to focus on this year, Schaid said. One of the first steps in its ELL/Latino College Readiness Project will be to conduct focus groups with parents, educators and Hispanic students who are new to the college to identify any unique barriers for the group, such as language, she said.

”We certainly want to reach out to all groups. You’ve got to start somewhere, and you can’t look at every group at once,” Schaid said.

“It’s not about ethnicity. It’s about all students being college ready.”