Initiatives & Resources

Gulf Coast Spotlight: Houston Pathways

Launched in 2009 and funded by Houston Endowment, Houston Pathways started as collaboration between Houston Community College (HCC), San Jacinto College (http://www.sanjac.edu/), the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and the California Partnership for Achieving Student Success (Cal-PASS). The project began as a response to alignment issues between high school and college curriculum, and now includes the original collaborators as well as five local independent school districts (ISDs) and the University of Houston (UH) System.

Houston Pathways is organized into two local regions with participation in the ISD, community college and university level to form four vertical alignment teams in the areas of Mathematics, English/Language Arts, U.S. History and Biology.

Dr. Juan Carlos Reina, HCC's Director of Academic Resource Development, serves as the Houston Pathways program director. Dr. Reina identified the objective of Houston Pathways in three parts.

The first part is "to create a network of educators who will be able to make decisions based on an analysis of data. The second is to establish a network of data; for this, all of the institutions had to sign a memorandum to send student data (directly to THECB). The third objective is to see clearly that students progress faster and complete their degrees."

During the initial year, the program focused on studying student data reports from partnering ISDs. Student information such as: what courses a student took, when he/she took them, what grade the student earned, and what TAKS score he/she achieved was looked at in context of the student's demographics (including gender, ethnicity and economic status).

Students' performance in college was also tracked and analyzed. Given a student's demographics and high school performance, Houston Pathways will be able to project probable paths and outcomes for the student. This will help educators identify if and when an intervention would be beneficial.

Currently, this compilation of data is being used to identify inequalities in student performance between high school and college, so that they can target these areas for improvement.

"For example," Dr. Reina said, "If a student is taking AP Calculus (during their senior year), the probability that they will go into college-level calculus should be very high."

The mathematics team has been surprised to find that a high percentage of students who take high-level math courses in high school still test into the developmental (remedial) math classes upon taking a college placement test.

Mathematics, he said, is an especially large concern. Depending on the ISD, anywhere from 65 to 75 percent of its graduates will place in the developmental math sequence upon entering college.

As a response to this statistic, and "in order to understand this process better, all the members of the Houston Pathways math team went to a testing center and went through the same test that the students go through," said Dr. Reina.

This led the group to develop learning modules that high school teachers could use in class. After having their classes go through the modules for five weeks, the students took HCC's college placement test.

Dr. Reina said that although they saw an increase of five to ten percent in student performance on the test, such a small increment would not reflect significantly in the percentage of students who place into College Algebra.

"We just finished (evaluating these results), about two weeks ago. Now we're planning for this term," he said, also sharing that improvements and "corrections in the logistics" of the modules have been made. Several recommendations from participating teachers and administrators will be implemented in the coming term.

The English/Language Arts (ELA) team conducted similar studies. The team composed a qualitative survey for ELA instructors throughout Houston in order to discover what discrepancies exist among their classroom expectations.

"What is it the secondary teachers expect, and what do the college or university professors expect?" Dr. Reina asked. "We're meeting next week to look at all the details from that (survey). THECB helped with the analysis, as did our own team."

Though the data shows that percentages of students placing below college level are not as high in ELA as math, "this (placement testing) is where all of the mismatching seems to be evident."

"In History, for example, the (standards) are very strict. (Teachers) are under a lot of pressure to cover the TEAKS. But once students get into higher-education institutions, they seem to be lacking critical thinking skills. So that is something the History group is studying right now. What we've found so far is that there is not such a huge misalignment in the curriculum, but that it's more about the depth of student knowledge."

Dr. Reina identified student placement and developmental education as a "huge issue, state-wide issue," and is pleased that funding for Houston Pathways will last through 2015. "Right now, we're in the early stages," he said. Further research and data analysis will continue as the project progresses, and these interventions will undergo constant refinement.

As for the Biology group: "Being scientists, they have been doing a lot of research. They have studied pretty much anything that can be studied," Dr. Reina shared. One trend in the data was discovered by Dan Wells, chair of Biology at UH, that Hispanics are largely unrepresented in the Biology major.

"Not only are Hispanics not enrolled in the majors' Biology (classes) at the same rate as the other ethnic groups, but they're also not performing very well," Dr. Reina said.

After creating a "snapshot" of a cohort of students, both Biology majors and non-majors, a survey has been created to inquire into the differences in students' expectations as they move into Science, and Biology particularly. Through this survey, Dr. Reina hopes to answer the question, "Why is it that Hispanics seem not to be interested in following science or medical careers?

Factors like social status and work habits will be looked into, along with whether the student is a first-generation college student or not.

As the group presses on, he hopes to see "alignment teams and partnerships in secondary and post-secondary become more of the norm."

The project will be expanding to include more institutions in 2012, as Houston Endowment has just awarded $1 million to the University of Texas at Austin's Community College Leadership Program.

"The new grant will involve Lone Star Community College and five other community colleges, all around the same core idea: always partnering with ISD faculty and university faculty. So it's growing," Dr. Reina said.

The enlarged project will kick off by January 2012 and be called Gulf Coast Pathways, as it will include a much larger part of the Gulf Coast region than only the Houston Area.

"With this new funding," Dr. Reina said, "The ISDs will be equal partners in the program, on an equal level with HCC and the other colleges and universities. That way they will have a buy-in from the beginning."

He said, "Ultimately, we're going to affect policy. We're interested to see the impact on student success that follows."