This review categorizes colleges’ approaches to improving developmental education into four broad types of interventions:1. Interventions aimed at helping students avoid developmental education by shoring up their skills before they enroll in college
2. Interventions designed to accelerate students’ progress through developmen- tal education by shortening the timing or content of their developmental edu- cation courses
3. Programs that provide contextualized basic skills together with occupational or college-content coursework
4. Programs that enhance the supports for developmental-level learners, such as advising or tutoring
Of these, acceleration and contextualization strategies appear to hold the most promise for improving developmental education students’ success. In particular, programs that show the greatest benefits with relatively rigorous documentation either mainstream developmental students into college-level courses with additional supports, provide modularized or compressed courses to allow remedial students to more quickly complete their developmental work, or offer contextualized remedial education within occupational and vocational programs.