Double Jeopardy: Testing the Effects of Multiple Basic Skills Deficiencies on Successful Remediation.

Prior research has established that the depth and breadth of remedial need in basic skills (math and English) are strongly and negatively associated with the likelihood that the student eventually will achieve college-level competency in those subjects (i.e., remediate successfully). This well-documented finding is built upon a body of empirical work employing either simple bivariate analyses or regression analyses that assume additive effects of multiple basic skill deficiencies. Yet, there are reasons to suspect that additive effects may not represent accurately the consequences of multiple basic skill deficiencies on favorable academic outcomes, and that multiple deficiencies instead may exhibit a compounding negative effect (multiplicative interaction effect) on the likelihood of successful remediation. In this research, I test for this compounding effect of math and English skill deficiencies on the likelihood of successful mathematics remediation. Using logistic regression to analyze data addressing a population of 55,518 remedial math students monitored for a period of 6 years, I test the hypothesis that the negative effect of math skill deficiency increases in magnitude with decreasing English competency. I find that students exhibiting a greater need for remedial English assistance experience a greater negative effect of math skill deficiency on the likelihood of successful mathematics remediation relative to students who require less or no remedial English assistance. However, upon closer examination, I find that these effects do not have substantive importance in the face of the overwhelming powerful direct effect of math skill deficiencies on the likelihood of successful mathematics remediation. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]