In recent years, Eastern Connecticut State University has made efforts to address this issue by creating a data-driven approach to a longstanding priority of the university: helping low-income, minority, and first-generation students succeed.

Incorporating this goal into the strategic plan has kept this issue in the forefront. Title III grants and participation in the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s Project Compass, a five-year initiative to improve retention and graduation rates, have provided the funding and accountability to make this effort possible and continue the momentum.

The first step in the Project Compass project was to identify the various sources of data. “Student affairs and housing are always collecting data. The library collects usage data. We have data on who gets tutoring. Everyone’s collecting some data. At the same time, all universities have to provide external reports on retention rates, not only for all students but also broken down by ethnic groups.

Then there are evaluation surveys that freshmen and seniors fill out—satisfaction surveys and engagement surveys. All this data are there, but we wanted to know: Who’s at risk of leaving in the first year? Who’s at risk for leaving after the second year? Can we use the information on the students coming in and develop a model that will predict who’s more likely to leave? And that’s what we did,” says Carmen Cid, dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Eastern Connecticut State University.

Understanding the student population
Although it’s important to understand effective practices from peer institutions, each institution has a unique culture that needs to be understood in order to help students succeed. At the outset, “most people really couldn’t characterize our student population. We might have had some sense of gender distribution, maybe a little bit about ethnicity, but not a whole lot. So part of it was plodding along, trying to ask very simple questions about our students and adding that to our dataset,” Martin says.

Before this initiative, there was no first-generation or high school GPA data being collected, so the admissions form was modified.

The university uses a logistic regression model to predict which students will be at risk for withdrawal. This model uses high school GPA, engagement, and other factors to group each student into one of five levels of risk for withdrawal. In addition, project participants collected qualitative data through focus groups to determine some of the reasons why students were staying or leaving. “Numbers are very important, but you have to do student focus groups,” Cid says.

For example, analysis of quantitative data showed that transfer students do particularly well in some majors, which makes them a key target population to recruit. Understanding why they succeed is a different matter. Cid and her colleagues were able to get at this important information by asking transfer students from each of the university’s feeder schools who have succeeded about their experience at the university and what was helpful for them.

“You have to work this from various angles. You really have to develop a student success network. You have to know who needs extra help, given what you know from these data. Half the people who leave the first year are not necessarily academically deficient. They’re leaving to transfer to other places, perhaps a community college because it’s cheaper or closer to home. Or they actually improved their calculus skills, and they’re going to another university that has an engineering program. These are things you find out, but the main thing is that you have to have various people looking at the data together and talking about it,” Cid says.

One way this dialogue has been facilitated has been through the community of practice created as part of Project Compass. Funding was contingent on regular meetings of this group of people from across the university to generate a work plan and share accomplishments. “It’s kind of like having an academic coach. [Project Compass] also provided professional development to us twice a year,” Cid says.

Martin adds: “While in some respects it was difficult, one of the things that did happen was that lots of people from different parts of the university got to grapple with the raw data as it was coming forward and really participated in the analysis. Through that process ,they got a chance to really identify what the group thought was important as well as what the researchers thought was important.”

Faculty involvement
Faculty involvement in this initiative is essential, and there have been two things that have motivated faculty to participate: the desire to better serve the students and the potential to engage in activities that employ their skills (and could potentially produce publishable research).

Faculty can serve as experts in analyzing data. There are many talented people at any university with skills who might think of this as a really nice research project. So you engage the faculty as problem solvers—psychologists, sociologists, and mathematicians—who are interested in helping students.

Funding and release time might encourage some faculty members to get involved. Others are motivated by their sense of obligation to their students.

“We know that people are leaving, but when we see how they leave our own majors, it asks us to really reconsider what we’re doing individually with relatively small groups of people that we have relationships with. I said to faculty, ‘This is not just about data. It’s not just about our admission process. It’s not just about student affairs and residence life making life OK for students. It’s about you. You have to have some ownership of not just the academic success but the persistence of students and their timely graduation.’ That, I think, is beginning to be a big cultural shift for people. And it’s not fully accepted by every faculty member. But I think that sense that we have to be responsible for this really came from the data,” Martin says.

Another way to engage faculty in the issue of student success has been through an online course for faculty. The goal is to get faculty to understand the issues involved with low-income, first-generation, and minority students. “We’re reading the research about this and having lots of online discussion about pedagogy and good practices,” Martin says.

Excerpted from Data-Driven Student Success, Academic Leader, 28.1 (2012): 4.

Contrary to what some in higher education believe, attending to students’ needs does not erode the process of higher learning; it enhances it. The collaboration of educator and student, who each bring varied insights and experience to the educational process, is unique to the learning environment. But within the student/teacher dynamic is the opportunity for faculty to wield significant influence in students’ perception that they are cared for by an institution that is responsive to their needs. Consider the customer service objectives outlined by the University of Texas at El Paso, which state:

In the classroom, on campus, and in the community, as UTEP representatives, we will:

• Interact with others respectfully and courteously.
• Listen carefully in an effort to understand others’ points of view.
• Be knowledgeable problem solvers.
• Take responsibility for UTEP’s continuous improvement.

These objectives do not suggest that students are “always right,” that their education is a commodity, or that faculty members are dedicated to pleasing them (and their parents). Instead, all members of the community are committed to ensuring that higher learning is a collaborative endeavor built on a foundation of respect, trust, and shared commitment to the values of education. Profound learning outcomes can emerge from such a framework.

While much of students’ “customer service” experience takes place in areas outside of the classroom, faculty can provide good academic service through a variety of mechanisms, most of which are simple and fairly intuitive. First, it’s important to clearly outline the objectives of the course in a manner that students understand. Spending time at the beginning of the course explaining and outlining the context of the objectives provides a framework for the semester’s activities, contributes to students’ understanding of how the course material supports the learning objectives, and reinforces how the course itself relates to their field of study. Further, a clear explanation helps students understand what they need to do in order to have a successful academic experience.

Throughout the semester, providing timely answers to students’ questions is an act of customer service. It’s certainly a challenge in a 24/7 digital environment to keep up with the demands for communication. However, little makes a student feel less valued than a significant delay in a response to questions. One way to manage the communication demands is to post clear policies on the syllabus, including a stand-alone FAQ page (I teach an online class with enrollment of up to 125, and without the FAQs, I’d be answering email all day, every day). Helping students find the information they need on their own is important, but if students have questions about the course material, it should be a priority to answer it as quickly as we can, even if we’re directing the student back to a course resource.

Regular feedback is another important academic customer service point. I am always surprised to hear from faculty who state that they can’t submit midterm grades because none of their assignments is due yet. For a variety of reasons, six weeks of instruction without the benefit of feedback is problematic. Even if course content and structure do not lend themselves to regularly graded assignments, it’s important for students to know whether or not they are successfully meeting course objectives. Regular feedback not only contributes to improved learning, it also mitigates any potential misunderstandings regarding student performance that could emerge later in the semester.

A commitment to good customer service is not antithetical to the values of higher education. We can provide good customer service without relegating ourselves to the ranks of knowledge brokers. Employing simple, intuitive support strategies in the classroom will enhance students’ learning and overall college experience.

Christine M. Nowik is the Assistant Dean of Student Success and Retention at Cedar Crest College.

What Can I Do to Increase Student Retention?

Program includes a CD with the video presentation, plus supplemental materials, PowerPoint slides, and complete transcript • $99

It’s never a good feeling to learn that a student has left your class … or worse, left school altogether. Often it comes as a complete surprise — before you even realize they have a problem, they’re gone.

There are some powerful tools and techniques you can use to prevent these “unhappy endings,” and you can learn about them in the 20 Minute Mentor program, What Can I Do to Increase Student Retention?

Watch a brief clip:

This fast, focused video presentation is led by two veteran educators: Rob Jenkins, professor of English and “Two-Year Track” columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Debi Moon, J.D., recipient of a National Teaching Excellence Award and an administration and faculty member at Georgia Perimeter College.

Together, they share strategies for keeping your students connected to you, their classmates, and the course material.

During this program you’ll learn:

• How to promote a sense of community and collaboration.
• How to help students discover their learning styles (and adjust your teaching accordingly).
• How to guard against students falling behind and getting “lost.”
• How to promote active learning and critical thinking.
• How to build student confidence and competence through participation in shared-teaching exercises.
• And more.

You’ll come away with ideas you can implement right now in your classroom to give every student a better chance for success.

Easy on your schedule and your budget
At just 20 minutes, the program won’t dominate your day – and you can watch it any time. It’s priced right, too … just $99. That includes not only the video presentation, but several pages of additional material, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and full transcript.

Discover how you can help keep students engaged, encouraged and enrolled. Order this 20 Minute Mentor today.

Each Magna 20 Minute Mentor includes a CD with the video presentation, supplemental materials, a copy of the PowerPoint slides and the program’s transcript.

The sobering fact is that less than sixty percent of the students entering four-year colleges in America today are graduating within six years. (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009.) Minority students and those from poor families have an especially difficult time reaching the graduation milestone.

Historically, faculty members have not been expected to play a major role in retaining students. Their role, instead, was to “sort” students by assigning them grades based on their performance. The common view, for quite a long time, was that “students have a right to fail.” Many institutions did not even bother keeping track of the number of dropouts from their institutions or programs. In times of plentiful students and budget surpluses, this laissez-faire approach was tenable. This view is changing, rapidly, under the current conditions.

The new thinking is that institutions have a responsibility to promote and support student learning and that they should measure their success as institutions based upon how well their students learned. Certainly, students have a great deal of responsibility for their own success, but so does the institution and, by implication, the faculty members.

The shift from “teaching” to “learning,” then, is really a shift away from measuring the success of a college or university based upon resources and processes to measuring success based upon outcomes. These imperatives are behind the current drive to collect student success data and to help faculty and staff develop strategies to raise success rates. In short, institutions are turning to their faculties for help in improving upon dismal retention numbers.

Retention is not only a growing expectation and imperative, but it is also an opportunity for faculty members to take the lead in innovating, researching, and implementing new strategies while demonstrating their effectiveness. This is both a challenge and a huge opportunity for college professors to take the lead in re-creating the college learning experience in ways that are more supportive and effective.

Faculty members are on the front-line of meeting the increasingly important retention imperative. Instructors interact with students frequently and are likely to be among the first to notice signs that a student is disengaging from college and at-risk of dropping out. By learning to recognize the warning signs and taking informed intervention action, a faculty member can play a key role in changing the course of a student’s life for the better. This is an exciting opportunity and a big responsibility, but future generations depend on our willingness to rise to the challenge.

Excerpted from What Faculty Members Need to Know About Retention, a Magna white paper. Learn more about this valuable resource »

Reference
Bowen,William, Chingos, Matthew, & McPherson, Michael. (2009.) Crossing the Finish Line:
Completing College at America’s Public Universities. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

To better address the needs of entering students, many colleges and universities now include learning community experiences. Typically, learning communities are organized around one of four common models:

1. linked or clustered courses (a cohort of students taking the same group of courses),
2. cohorts in large courses (a group of students in a large course sharing other curricular experiences associated with the large course),
3. team-taught or coordinated studies programs (students taking courses, often with theme-based content, that are team taught by professors from different fields), and
4. living-learning communities (students living together in a residence hall and taking courses together).

Since the early ’90s, Temple University in Philadelphia has had a well-established linked-course learning communities program. About 10 years in, the program was assessed to “establish whether the overall learning community experience [in terms of the activities in the courses] was the same for everyone.” (p. 262) The school discovered that it was not. The differences were a result, first, of the students themselves.

Researchers identified six different clusters of students. In the largest one, “Students were actively engaged in almost all aspects of the learning community experience—from in-class to out of class, on both academic and social fronts.” (p. 256) The second largest cluster consisted of students almost the “antithesis” of those in the first—“not engaged with each other or the teacher and not experiencing high levels of activity either in or outside of class.” (p. 256-257). This caused the researchers to conclude, “Learning communities are not uniformly beneficial for all students.” (p. 262)

They also discovered that not all teachers were including activities usually associated with learning communities—things like having students work in groups. The researchers note that various interactive methods fit naturally with the goals of learning communities. “When an institution makes a commitment to the learning community program, it should recognize also the need to prepare appropriately its faculty to utilize teaching methods that are conducive to positive results.” (p. 264)

A variety of other findings support the general conclusion that the learning community experience is not uniform in its effects. “Students enter learning communities with different goals, different reasons, different attitudes about what helps them learn, and different skills. The learning community experience will clearly enhance and improve the educational experience of some, but can be lost on, even counter-productive, for others.” (p. 263)

This is a robust empirical inquiry of a well-established and carefully designed and executed program. It should cause faculty members involved with learning communities, as well as institutions that have them, not to make assumptions about automatic benefits. It’s a study that shows what should have been suspected from the beginning. Learning communities are a powerful pedagogy, but they are not a cure-all for long-standing problems associated with students who are not well prepared for college or do not accurately expect what it will take to succeed in college.

Reference: Jones, P. R., Laufgraben, J. L., and Morris, N. (2006). Developing an empirically based typology of attitudes of entering students toward participation in learning communities. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31 (3), 249-265.

Reprinted from The Teaching Professor, March 2009.

These numbers, based on the 2004–2005 results of the ACT and featured in the report Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College Readiness in Reading, show that student readiness for college-level reading is at its lowest point in more than a decade.

As an educator on the front lines, you don’t have to read between the lines. You see it in your classes every day and it’s quite evident: an increasing number of students are arriving on college campuses unprepared for the academic rigors that await them.

But that doesn’t mean these unprepared students are destined for failure. Dr. Kathleen Gabriel, assistant professor at California State University-Chico, says student success starts with faculty and students who believe that it’s never too late to learn as long as you’re willing to put in the extra time and effort.

In the recent online seminar Teaching Unprepared Students: Success and Retention Strategies, Gabriel shared techniques for helping students with weak reading, writing, and study skills, as well as getting them to take responsibility for their learning. Unfortunately, one of the problems with at-risk students is, sometimes the instructor may not be aware of academic deficiencies until it’s almost too late. To address this, Gabriel recommends having students complete a short reading comprehension or writing assignment during the first couple of classes to get a baseline of their basic skills.

Also during that first week, reach out to your students by learning their names and encouraging them to learn the names of their classmates. Gabriel also conducts short informal “interviews” with her students during the start of each term to learn more about their background and interests, as well as to create the kind of faculty-student bond that’s so important to student success.

Another key to success, especially for academically unprepared students, is class attendance. Although simply knowing everyone’s name will help with attendance issues, Gabriel makes sure students participate once they’re there by having an interactive learning activity for every 15-20 minutes of lecture. For example, a class activity could be a “write-pair-share” activity or an activity where students have to engage with the content by creating a chart or graph that explains that day’s lesson. These items are then handed in for “class activity points” and can’t be made-up if a student misses class.

“It’s important to provide students with active learning experiences that will tap into their existing knowledge and experiences to help enhance their connection to the new material,” says Gabriel.

Teaching Unprepared Students: Success and Retention Strategies

The number of students arriving on campus unprepared for the rigors of postsecondary education continues to skyrocket. Many students have inadequate reading, writing, and study skills, while others have defined learning disabilities. These at-risk students create big challenges faculty members who are being asked to help with campus retention efforts without sacrificing course quality.

Lowering expectations is not the way to handle this challenge. Nobody wants to sacrifice quality just to raise graduation numbers. Can these two goals–high retention and high expectations–ever be reconciled?

Fortunately, there are effective strategies to help faculty members assist academically deficient students.

In Teaching Unprepared Students: Success & Retention Strategies, Dr. Kathleen Gabriel of California State University, Chico shows faculty members and campus leaders how to navigate this difficult terrain as she shares practical strategies for improving at-risk students’ skills and increasing student success rates.

Order this seminar

The advice in this seminar will prepare you to provide the necessary support so that your students can meet course requirements and complete their college programs.

This audio seminar covers:

• Descriptions and definitions of unprepared students
• How to identify the unprepared students in your classes
• Current success rates of at-risk students
• Strategies to increase student engagement with course material
• Specific actions to help raise class attendance
• Ways to decrease at-risk student “avoidance” behavior
• Techniques to improve retention and comprehension levels
• How to implement “learner-centered” teaching methods
• Helpful ways to interact with at-risk and unprepared students
• Methods to assist students with weak reading, writing, or study skills

Who will benefit?

• Faculty members
• Instructors
• Lecturers
• Teaching assistants
• Instructional designers
• Faculty development team
• Faculty evaluation team members
• Department leadership
• College and university administrators

Improving retention efforts on your campus is one of the best investments you can make.

Order this seminar