A Theoretical Study on Dual Enrollment Program in the U. S.: Focusing on the Mechanism of Promoting College Readiness

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to seek a theoretical rationale of Dual Enrollment as a way to promote students’ college readiness. In DE, high school students take college courses and receive college credit.

Three research questions are investigated. The overarching question is: Does Dual Enrollment prepare student for college access and college success? If so, why? A secondary question follows: Which elements of college readiness (cognitive factors, non-cognitive factors or campus integration factors) is promoted through Dual Enrollment? And finally: Through what mechanisms do Dual Enrollment studentsdevelop their college readiness?

To answer these questions, the following approach was used. Previous literatures which revealed students’ experience and perception in Dual Enrollment（Karp2006; Swanson 2008; Karp2012;Kanny2015）are analyzed, and key concepts are extracted from them. By constructing these concepts, this paper advocates a theoretical model to explain the mechanism of promoting students’ college readiness.

This paper concludes that exposing high school students to higher education environment makes two changes to students. First, Dual Enrollment students change their identities. They get the “role” as a college student and change their learning behaviors. Second, they understand the “hidden curriculum” (Kanny 2015) in higher education, which include College Knowledge (Conley 2007) such as the normative rules and support information. The process that makes these changes is “anticipatory socialization” (Swanson 2008), which is caused by “authentic experience” in higher education (Karp 2006).

From this point of view, this paper considers the implementation to Japanese secondary and higher education researches. In Japan, there is few institutional foundations to support Dual Enrollment, so it’s not realistic to imitate these programs. However, it’s possible to take in these theoretical mechanisms and put into practice within the existing institution as a way to promote students’ college readiness. Although there are lots of studies on foreign educational institutions, few of them focus the theoretical rationale. Further development of theoretical research is required in Japanese educational research.