Evaluating and Auditing a Community College Learning Skills Center Program.

The Learning Skills Center (LSC) at Los Angeles City College is an individualized learning laboratory which offers assistance to students in communication skills and quantitative skills, and provides tutoring in all college-level courses. ISC's programs are diagnostic and prescriptive, and services are available to students on both voluntary and referral bases. This document describes the establishment of an evaluation and management control system for LSC, and presents the results of the first evaluation. Basically, the evaluation involved a comparison of dropout rates between those LSC students who were enrolled in basic English or mathematics classes, and Los Angeles City College students who had been involved in a baseline dropout study. The baseline persistence study showed a dropout rate of 42.8 percent for students in basic English. The dropout rates for the LSC program participants enrolled in basic English, on the other hand, were 16 percent for the fall semester and 6.6 percent for the spring semester of 1974-75. The baseline study showed a 45 percent dropout rate for basic mathematics, as compared to 22.1 percent for the LSC participants during the fall semester and 10 percent for the spring semester. Data are organized into tables, and a bibliography of references for educational program evaluation and audit is appended. (Author/NHM)