Diversifying Undergraduate Chemistry Course Pathways to Improve Outcomes for At-Risk Students

A lack of preparedness for college-level coursework has been shown to negatively impact student success rates in STEM. Remedial instruction has been the most widespread approach to helping at-risk students attain college-level competencies; however, studies have shown that remediation has had null or negative impacts on degree completion for students placed into these courses. This study examines two decades worth of data from one institution to evaluate the efficacy of course pathway diversification as an alternative model to traditional remediation on general chemistry students' first- and second-semester outcomes. In this approach, students with low mathematics placement exam scores take a separate lecture offering of general chemistry I with a corequisite support course (GCI-S) that is offered in parallel with the mainstream course (GCI-M). The course content across these offerings is the same, and successful students in either course are rejoined in a common general chemistry II course (GCII) in the subsequent semester. Our results indicate that first-semester outcomes for at-risk students have improved markedly since the inception of GCI-S relative to non-at-risk students. However, these improvements are not as apparent in GCE Additionally, while the achievement gap in first-semester general chemistry outcomes between GCI-S and GCI-M students has improved, corresponding achievement gaps in GCII have worsened. We discuss the implications of our findings in ways that might guide the efforts of others in better supporting our most vulnerable students in chemistry.