Most of these questions are being answered in stages by research inquiries that address smaller issues related to these larger questions. For example, Carolyn Hart has completed an integrative review of the research literature in the hopes of identifying those factors that positively affect a student’s persistence in an online course. Do we know what differentiates students who complete online courses from those who drop out?

Her review is based on 20 studies published since 1999. She found that researchers used a wide range of definitions for persistence. She opted for this straightforward description: persistence is “the ability to complete an online course despite obstacles or adverse circumstances.” (p. 30) The opposite of persistence is attrition, which she defined as “withdrawal from an online course.” (p. 30) Based on her review, she identified the following factors as being related to student persistence in online courses.

Satisfaction with online learning – Not surprising, students who are satisfied with online courses and programs persist. In one study, students who had graduated from an online program reported satisfaction levels above 90%, those enrolled in a program reported 70% satisfaction levels, and those just beginning indicated a 58% satisfaction level. Those percentages compared with 20% satisfaction levels reported by those who withdrew from courses. (p. 34)

A sense of belonging to a learning community – Students who are comfortable establishing relationships in an online environment tend to persist at higher rates. These are students who can successfully participate in online discussions and work with others they do not know or have not met. The feeling of “camaraderie” among students within the class contributes to persistence.
Motivation – Highly motivated students complete online courses. “Personal resolve and determination to succeed strongly contributes to persistence.” (p. 34)

Peer and family support – Those learning in online environments more often successfully complete courses if they have peer and family support. The emotional support provided by peers, family, and sometimes even faculty, is especially important when students are trying to complete online courses at the same time they are coping with hardships or juggling competing demands.

Time management skills – “Students with good study habits, [who have] the ability to stay on task with assignments and readings, and [who] are able to successfully manage time are more apt to persist when compared to non-persisters.” (p. 31)

Increased communication with the instructor – “Qualitative findings indicate that in addition to promptness, the quality of feedback, and the willingness of faculty to meet student needs are viewed as important to student persistence.” (p. 33-4)

Some of these factors for success in the online classroom are not unexpected. It makes sense that students are more likely to complete a course when they are happy with how the course is going and self-motivated enough to see it through. Others factors implicate how online courses should be taught and to some degree who should teach them. Online courses need to be designed so that students have opportunities to connect and work with each other. They should be taught by teachers who understand the importance of communication with students and who willingly interact with them throughout the course.

The research findings also give an indication of who should be taking online courses. If the student is one of those not particularly well prepared for college-level work and not an especially motivated beginning student, online courses early in the college experience may not be advised.

Online courses can be designed so that they work well for many students and with most content. And most teachers can learn how to teach online. But those courses, like any kind of instruction, don’t work well automatically, which means the questions of who takes, who teaches, and what content is most appropriate should influence our decision-making.

Reference: Hart, C. (2012). Factors associated with student persistence in an online program of study: A review of the literature. Journal of Interactive Online Learning, 11 (1), 19-42.

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.

As the collaboration continued, Mary realized that she had created a unique opportunity where the entire class was helping each other learn. With more than 30 students actively collaborating on the document, she was certain that the whole class would be successful on the exam. That’s where Mary’s internal alarm went off and that’s why she came to see me.

Mary is an education major and was a student in one of my classes last year. From our work together, I know she’s going to be a great teacher one day. Mary was concerned about the collaborative study guide and wondered whether it could be misinterpreted as cheating. Education majors are held to a high ethical standard at our institution and disposition concerns can lead to someone being removed the program. If everyone got A’s on the exam, would the professor think that somehow the class had cheated? As the person who started the collaborative document, would she somehow be to “blame” for the class’s success?

I tried to calm Mary’s fears. I explained that I was proud of her since she was implementing the concepts we had discussed in our class. In our Instructional Technology class, we had talked about 21st century skills like collaboration and communication and Mary was actually applying the concepts to help her peers learn and succeed. I really didn’t believe that her actions would lead to disciplinary actions but I offered to speak to the professor to alleviate any concerns. Mary left my office relieved and encouraged.

Despite her reassured departure, Mary’s situation has been on my mind for the last few days. As educators, I believe we’re motivated to help all of our students learn. We want to provide them with the tools to help them succeed and hope that they’ll meet the high standards we set for them. As a student, Mary had created a collaborative learning environment for her peers but worried that if everyone was successful that the success could be misinterpreted or worse, devalued. In a somewhat ironic twist, success for everyone was undermining the very concept of success. It’s almost as if for success to be real, authentic or earned, there had to be some unsuccessful students as well. I know Mary didn’t really think this way but her internal alarm went off nonetheless. As educators, we need to move past the concept of education as competition. Learning shouldn’t be a race with winners and losers. Learning is about personal growth and meeting high expectations. As educators, we should be embracing student-led collaborative efforts that lead to class-wide success and looking for ways to foster it ourselves.

Here are a few ways you can help to stoke the fires of collaboration in your class:

• Make your expectations clear. You don’t need to necessarily provide a grading rubric for your assignments, but you do need to make sure students know what you expect. While students always want to know page length and formatting criteria for papers, I choose to provide leading questions to help students assess their own work and the work of their classmates. By knowing the expectations, students can better help one another work toward meeting my learning goals.
• Introduce students to Google Drive (the new home of Google Docs) or some other collaborative writing tool. With their chaotic schedules, students can’t always meet in traditional study groups like they once did. By introducing an online space that they can use, you help to endorse their collaboration.
• Avoid grading on a curve. While this may sound counter-intuitive, grading on a curve can undermine student collaboration. Students who don’t want to see a classmate “ruin the curve” won’t be motivated to collaborate with them and help them succeed.

If students work together and an entire class meets our standards, we should celebrate it. We need to promote a culture in our classrooms and on our campuses where success isn’t defined or guided by failure but attributed to success in itself. That’s a huge undertaking but I think it’s more aligned to the promise of education, especially in the 21st century.

Dr. Oliver Dreon is the director of the Center for Academic Excellence at Millersville University.

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.

A Good Start: Helping First-Year Students Acclimate to College

We’ve all seen the shocked look on first-year students when they see their midterm grades. Too often, that is the first time they realize that college academics are very different from high school academics.

Many first-year students arrive at college unprepared. It’s not that they aren’t smart or motivated. Instead, what they’re experiencing is a gap between the academic culture in high school and the culture of the university. These students arrive on campus thinking they are ready when no one has told them the rules have changed.

To make things worse, many college instructors are unaware of the experiences that shape these students’ expectations in three key areas:

1. Testing – In some high schools, students may redo failed tests, quizzes, and projects until they achieve the desired grade.
2. Attendance – Some schools make excused absences easy to obtain, and expectations for makeup work may be just as loose.
3. Grading – Grading on a relative scale sometimes means that a grade of 25% can be a passing grade.

It’s no wonder so many students stumble. The expectations, policies, and procedures in college are completely different. That’s why someone has to teach them how to be a college student.

Watch a brief clip from the seminar:

Order the CD + Transcript Package

A Good Start: Helping First-year Students Acclimate to College will teach you the practical skills and strategies needed to help incoming students learn the expectations, policies, and practices of their new educational environment.

Led by Dr. Mary C. Clement, director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Berry College, this seminar first maps the changes in high school academic practices in the last 10–20 years. Then it outlines and explains some of the key things you can do to give your students a greater chance to succeed.

You’ll learn how to:

• Discover your students’ academic background and use that information to target your teaching
• Communicate your expectations in the manner most likely to encourage positive changes in your students
• Draft effective grading policies that eliminate confusion and promote clarity
• Build policy reminders and explanations into the curriculum to maintain standards throughout the semester
• Develop tools to help your students succeed in your class and beyond

When you can help more of your students begin their college careers on a better footing, everyone benefits. This online seminar delivers both useful information and practical training to help you put your new skills into practice. Order a copy today to help your students make the most of their college experience — this year and every year after.

When you order the recording of this seminar on CD, you’ll also receive the complete transcript.

An optional Campus Access License is available for an additional $200. It allows the purchasing institution to upload the CD of the seminar onto the institution’s password-protected internal website for unlimited access by the entire campus community.

Order the CD + Transcript Package

Who will benefit?
This seminar is intended for:

• Full- and part-time faculty (especially those who teach underclassmen)
• Teaching assistants
• Department Chairs
• Deans

Of the more than 600 students (from multiple sections of the same course) who participated in the study, 18.7 percent had a low chemistry self-concept, compared with the 22.8 percent who had a high chemistry self-concept. All students took the same comprehensive final, a standardized test developed by the American Chemical Society. Scores on this test can be predicted by using a number of other measures. Students with the high self-concept scored 5 percent higher than their predicted scores, and students with the low self-concept scored 1.76 percent lower than their predicted scores. Even after the researchers controlled for SAT scores, “self-concept continued to play a role in student performance on the outcome measure [the exam], indicating the affective domain does play a role that is separate from conventional cognitive measures.” (p. 748)

Space prevents more explanation of how they conducted the study and analyzed the data, but both the design and analysis are robust. Check out the details for yourself, if the study and findings are of interest.

Is that more or less students than you’d expect to have low or high self-concepts in chemistry? The researchers describe the low group as “sizeable” but not an “overwhelming proportion” of general chem students. How many beginning students come to your academic area with low self-concepts about their ability to learn it? This study cites other research documenting that students’ perceptions of their abilities are content specific—students don’t believe they can do well in math, writing, drawing, or chemistry. But the most compelling question relates to what teachers can do to change these powerful perceptions of the ability to learn.

Reference: Lewis, S. E., Shaw, J. L., and Heitz, J. O. (2009). Attitude counts: Self-concept and success in general chemistry. Journal of Chemical Education, 86 (2), 744-749.