COMPUTER-ASSISTED-INSTRUCTION IN APPALACHIA POSTSECONDARY SCHOOLS

Many policy makers in the Appalachian state of West Virginia are troub led by the small percentage of high school graduates who enroll in a c ommunity college, college, or university. Our previous evaluations of public school-based efforts to increase postsecondary enrollments have yielded disappointing results. However, postsecondary institutions' o wn developmental education programs may provide another means of promo ting postsecondary enrollments in Appalachia and elsewhere. If the eff ectiveness of developmental education courses can be improved, this ma y help bridge the gap between high school and college. Accordingly, we posed a specific question: Does computer-assisted instruction improve teaching in grammar and writing to developmental students, when compa red with conventional instructional methods. The results of our quasi- experimental evaluation indicate that students receiving computer-assi sted instruction enjoy a substantial advantage. This advantage holds, moreover, when a fairly broad range of control variables are introduce d to assure that the results are not due to uncontrolled confounding f actors. These results suggest that if developmental education facilita tes postsecondary enrollments as intended, computer-assisted instructi on will improve its effectiveness. However, the small scale of our eva luation limits its value for policy-making purposes and makes generali zability problematic.