Helping More Students in the RMI Prepare for and Succeed in College and Careers

Summary

REL Pacific is working collaboratively with stakeholders in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) to promote awareness of evidence-based strategies to help more students transition successfully from high school to college and careers and facilitate collaboration among K–12, college, and workforce stakeholders through the use of research results, data, and best practices. One of the partnership's primary goals is to increase the number of students who graduate in the RMI with a college degree and are prepared to become leaders in their local communities.

High-Leverage Need

The RMI Partnership for College and Career Readiness and Success has identified students' college success in the RMI as a high-leverage need. More specifically, the partnership is concerned about the college readiness gap and how it may limit students' future success. Research suggests that many students in the RMI graduate from high school unprepared for college-level work or success in the workforce. More than 75 percent of recent incoming students at the College of the Marshall Islands (CMI) were initially placed in non-credit bearing developmental courses rather than credit-bearing courses, and many of these students never enroll in credit-bearing courses or go on to graduate.¹ The RMI Ministry of Education and CMI have expressed a need to not only learn more about college and career readiness and success, but to also learn about potential malleable factors such as high school academic preparation, and other influencing factors, such as demographic characteristics, that are associated with outcomes for students in the RMI. Understanding these influencing factors is critical to the RMI's efforts to provide high school experiences that will better prepare all students for future college success, in addition to informing future changes to policy and practice.

REL Pacific Project Support

To support this project, REL Pacific is implementing a series of training and coaching sessions that provide partnership members with a deeper understanding of research results, data, and evidence-based practices to guide changes in programs, policies, and practices with the goal of ensuring student success. To most effectively address the high-leverage need, REL Pacific is supporting stakeholders in the RMI by examining specific strategies used to improve college and career readiness, including allowing for multiple indicators to inform college placement decisions, providing early testing, designing transition courses, creating workforce alignment strategies, and redesigning developmental education. A secondary goal for this project is to improve partnership members' capacity to codesign, implement, and iteratively improve a transition course, aimed at easing the transition from high school to college courses. In addition, as part of the work with this partnership, REL Pacific is conducting a research study to examine whether and how high school data are predictive of college readiness and early college success at CMI.

REL Pacific has completed several trainings to date in the CNMI, with more to come. Participants in the training sessions include representatives from the CNMI Public School System (PSS), Northern Marianas College (NMC), and Mount Carmel private school, as well as the Commissioner of Education and the NMC Vice President of Learning and Student Success.

Contact

Marisa Crowder, researcher, supports REL partnership members' efforts to promote students' college and career readiness and success by fostering social and emotional learning in schools and building transition courses that help more students attain college math credit. She received her B.A. and M.A. in Psychology from San Diego State University and her Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Social Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno. Contact Marissa at mcrowder@mcrel.org or call 1.808.664.8181.

What's Happening in the Alliance

• Factors Predicting College Readiness and Early College Success: An Exploratory Study of High School Students' Demographic and Academic Characteristics In the Republic of Marshall Islands
• REL Pacific December 2018, Volume 5 Newsletter

Resources

• Transition Courses and College and Career Readiness in the Pacific Region
• Is it common for students who go straight to the workforce after high school to later enroll in community college for further training and education? How do community colleges accommodate such students and what are their outcomes?
• What are evidence-based practices that support students' success in coursework at college?
• What are the major reasons for college-level student dropout in contexts similar to the RMI?
• REL Pacific December 2017, Volume 2 Newsletter

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