Changing trends for administrative location of developmental education with an institution: A pilot study of NADE members

Abstract

With this limited pilot study, conclusions about the data are carefully restrained. However, a couple of interesting observations can be made. Not surprisingly, the most common name of the departmental unit for NADE members is developmental education. The surprise was observing that the regular academic departments of mathematics, English, and humanities occur with such a high frequency. Boylan (2002) indicated that some shifting away from centralized developmental education units may be occurring. This preliminary study seems to confirm that among the top ten departmental names that NADE members receive their mail, only two have the words developmental education explicitly listed in their titles. It appears that centralized developmental education administrative units are becoming rare. As a pilot study, it suggests that further investigation is warranted. Some possible directions could be a more careful analysis of the original data set. Similar studies could be conducted with other professional associations in the field (e.g., College Reading and Learning Association, National College Learning Center Association). Follow-up interviews with a stratified sample of members could probe for the historic choices made concerning departmental names and whether changes have occurred in the intervening years.