Becca Paez
The Paw Print
The McGraw-Hill/Kellog Developmental Educator Scholarships, which are designed to honor outstanding instructors that are dedicated to preparing students for college-level course work, was awarded to Karen Lemke.
The nation’s longest running advanced training progam for developmental educators; the full scholarship was awarded to Lemke at the National Association for Developmental Education (NADE) conference in Orlando, Florida. Lemke, the director of Developmental Education here at Adams State says, “receiving the scholarship validates my work initiating and directing programs to further students’ academic success.”
Executive vice president of enrollment management, Dr. Michael Mumper, started a campus-wide retention assessment. Results from this assessment revealed that the students who were most at risk for failure, drop-out and loan default, needed two or more developmental course (i.e. reading, writing, and math). Over 60 percent of incoming students here at Adams State require one or more remedial classes, and 35 percent need two or three of these remedial classes.
Lemke developed the STAY (Structured Transitional Academic Year) Program, a program designed for students, (transfers and incomming) to help them adjust to college life here at ASC. The results from this program reveal higher GPA and graduation rates.
As part of McGraw-Hill Education’s strive to advance the developmental education field, the corporation offers the McGraw-Hill/Kellog scholarship, with the hope that the number of students that need remediation will decrease, increasing a college student’s opportunities to be confident in their work and themselves, and with the use of adaptive technologies designed to help learning, it is the hope that college graduation rates will also increase.
Lemke plans to use the scholarship to “expand ASC’s developmental focus to ‘pre-remidate’ students. At a nearby high school, Lemke’s office works with the GEAR-UP program, which pairs up a college student with college-hopeful highschoolers and middle schoolers for mentoring and tutoring. Lemke says, “college mentors can demonstrate and teach them how to balance campus life and first-time independence with academic success.”
Good luck to Dr. Lemke, with decreasing the gap between remidal students.
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