CSULB and LBCC receive grant money

By Jennifer Kawai
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer

A five-year grant of $3.4 million was awarded to Cal State Long Beach and Long Beach City College by the U.S. Department of Education to help the schools develop better programs and services to improve student achievement in math, science and English, and to make the transition from city college to Cal State a smoother process.

The programs and services developed with the grant money will help students gain confidence when deciding to transfer between colleges and make certain that students have learned all that is needed from LBCC coursework when transitioning to CSULB coursework. In turn, the funding for the programs will help faculty understand students' needs when it comes to learning course material, and will allow faculty to better prepare their curriculum.

The funding for this grant comes from the U.S. Department of Education's Title V Program, which mainly serves colleges with a large Latino population. LBCC has more than 9,300 Latinos and CSULB has more than 8,000. According to officials, the transfer rate from LBCC to CSULB is not as high as the faculty wanted, so LBCC approached CSULB with a proposal for this joint grant.

Although the grant mainly serves the large Latino population, all students will benefit from the new services. The programs that will develop include: learning communities, supplemental instruction, multimedia learning modules, ability to assess learning outcomes and faculty use of technologies. This is the largest cooperative grant between the two colleges.

"The biggest difference in my view is that the program is done in a way that it's collaborative," said David Dowell, vice provost and director of strategic planning. "Lots of faculty agree that this is what we want to see."

The learning communities will focus on historically difficult English, math and science courses. The communities will be a group of students who take the same classes and form study groups together. Faculty will be able to understand where and how students can be better served and taught. Faculty will also be able to adjust their curriculum to how each community is adapting.

Supplemental instruction (SI) will also be available. Group tutors and mentors from CSULB will be available at LBCC to help groups of students review and better understand their coursework and the transferring process. An SI leader will have already taken the course at CSU and sit in on course meetings to help LBCC develop their courses to reflect those at CSULB. The supplemental instruction will be done through on-campus instruction, as well as on-line instruction.

"The difference of SI compared to normal tutoring is that it's a group learning process," said Jennifer Melton, SI coordinator. "We want students to know that the answers are out there and that we will guide them to the answer."

Learning outcome assessments will be made on how much students know by the time they are done at their respective institution. With the grant, developers are hoping and predict that there will be a higher transfer rate between the colleges because students will know exactly what is expected of them, and faculty will be able to tell their students what needs to be done. The grant will help target students' needs and will aid in providing for those needs. Faculty at both colleges will align their courses so that the transition from LBCC to CSULB will be a smoother process. Students who take a course at one college will learn the same material as those at the other college.

"Professors at CSULB can help students by having more in-class interaction with their students," said Michael Bateman, a teacher's assistant for the math department at CSULB. "Math is a participant sport, so getting students up to the board more will help."