A study of the college-level educational program of the Texas Department of Corrections

The primary objectives of this study were: (1) to report the current status of college-level education for inmates within the Texas Department of Corrections and other penal institutions over the nation; (2) to compare the opinions of inmate students with those of the Lee College on-campus students relative to the effectiveness of instruction of the teaching faculty (this comparison was also made between various inmate sub-groups); (3) to obtain the opinions and reactions of the instructional faculty to the Texas Department of Corrections program and its students; (4) to compare the achievement of the Texas Department of Corrections college-level students with that of students on the Lee College campus. Three types of questionnaires, administered during the late spring and early summer of 1970, were used in gathering data for the report. The first was a questionnaire designed to gather information on the current status of college-level instruction in both state and federal prisons. Replies were received from forty-five states and from nineteen of twenty-four federal institutions in the United States. In order to elicit the responses of students relative to the perceived effectiveness of their instructors, the Purdue Rating Scale for Instruction was administered to students in the classes of instructors teaching both on campus and in the Texas prison system. Another questionnaire was administered to the forty-four faculty members at Lee College who had taught or were teaching both on campus and within the Texas Department of Corrections. The purpose of this questionnaire was to gather information relative to the manner in which the instructional faculty viewed the Texas Department of Corrections program and inmate students when compared with the on-campus program at Lee College. Finally, a comparison was made between the final exam grades of inmate and on-campus students enrolled during the spring semester 1970. The grades used for this comparison were from students of instructors who taught the same class both on campus and at the Texas Department of Corrections and who administered the same objective type final exams in both classes. [...]