Dual Enrollment

CHAPTER II

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a historical overview of existing research and literature that have channeled the dual enrollment programmatic efforts and the influences that it has had in the expansion of dual enrollment, dual credit and concurrent enrollment programs across school districts throughout the states. Grounded on theoretical theories, this study embodies to support the theoretical framework (Academic Asspirations-Disis). This chapter is framed into four sections (1) a historical overview of dual enrollment, (2) benefits of dual enrollment, (3) challenges of dual enrollment, (4) models of dual enrollment and (5) the future of dual enrollment.

The purpose of the literature

It can be argued that the necessity to have readily available college bound population goes back as far as shortly after the end of the civil war when Charles W. Elliot first held the presidential office over Harvard University. Elliot held the longest presidency at Harvard, his tenure spanned between 1869 and 1909 upon his retirement. Initially, Elliot did not favor support for public education mainly because of poor student college-readiness and Harvard’s feeder system was made up of private college preparatory schools. Interestingly, after growing competition in recruiting students for new institutions such as Stanford, Cornell, MIT amongst others Elliot revisited his position (Christensen, 2011). His concerns for about public education lead him to hold regular faculty assemblies between Harvard faculty and high school faculty in which he proposed for high schools to adopt a Harvard developed curriculum to better prepare students for post-secondary education. Over the next several years Elliot expanded from local to national efforts as an end result was the development of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The efforts of his work materialized in high schools placing significant effort to broaden the reach to encompass all students, including the majority who would not attend a university or

Even within school districts that do offer dual credit coursework chances are that there will be a variance in the course options that are offered at each campus especially, for workforce or career-technical courses that are not offered district wide. Across some school districts, students are awarded fewer grade points that result in lower GPA when compared to AP courses (South Texas College Dual Enrollment Program, 2015) however, each district offers a student manual that discloses the weighted scale of AP and dual credit courses. The lack of uniformity, language, and data from state educational board provides little direction on how school districts are to model their programs. Although, the benefit of the dual credit is evident but, for countless students who seeking high GPAs will prefer to seek out courses that will give them an advantage in their class ranking. Currently, there is no central depository that collects systematic dual enrollment data and this makes it very difficult for stakeholders to access performance and statistical data for reports and further evaluation and assessments. In Texas Dual Credit policies exist both at the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) both agencies have their own data collection requirement separate from one another. A consequence brought on by the