Strengthening Pre-Collegiate Education in Community Colleges (SPECC) is a partnership of The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. A three-year project launched in 2005, SPECC focuses on teaching and learning in pre-collegiate, or developmental, mathematics and English courses. These courses serve students who aren't ready to take college-level courses - roughly 75 percent of entering students at California's community colleges. Though they are critical gateways to student success, the courses have traditionally received little funding or attention from policymakers.

Within SPECC, eleven California community colleges are working together to design more effective teaching models that overcome obstacles to student learning. Campuses are creating professional settings where faculty can collaboratively ask questions about student learning and gather data - both fine-grained descriptive data and broad-stroke numeric data - to answer those questions. The emphasis on faculty inquiry and collaboration builds on Carnegie's depth in the scholarship of teaching and learning by bringing the rigor of research to the valued activity of teaching.

Many of the campus projects will supplement prior research about innovations including learning communities, online curricula, and formative assessment. In addition to a wide range of data being collected, SPECC campuses are producing multimedia resources and toolkits to provide a "window on learning" for college faculty across the state and nation.

Web site:   http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/programs/index.asp?key=26