Help Students Get On a Path
- Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
Materials
Integrated Advising and Student Supports Readiness Assessment (posted 4/5/2018)
Colleges use this instrument to assess their readiness to design and implement advising and student support systems that are fully integrated into guided pathways. (American Association of Community Colleges and Achieving the Dream)
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
Checklist for iPASS Degree Planning Technology (posted 4/5/2018)
This document includes questions for institutions to consider as they set up and roll out their Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) Degree Planning system. (Achieving the Dream and Educause)
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
PRACTITIONER, PRESIDENT, AND PARTNER PERSPECTIVES
Bruce Vandal, Vice President, Complete College America (posted 4/5/2018)
We should be treating all students on day one as college students, treating them as students who are there to achieve a degree, that are committed to their academic goals, but just need some support to identify the appropriate path and to get them the academic skill support that they need, but do so in a college course. It’s a fundamental paradigm shift that we need to make.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
Davis Jenkins, Senior Scholar, Community College Research Center, Pathways Partner (posted 4/5/2018)
Now the case is the student coming into the experience. “Welcome to college. We don’t require an orientation, although it’s probably a good thing, but we do require you to go to the testing center and take a test that is not a very good test. And it will tell you, especially if you’re low income and minority, that you’re going to have to take the two courses you hated most in high school, algebra and writing, again.” Versus, “Welcome to college. We have 10 academic and career communities that we’ve worked with local employers and our university partners to map out. Now, you’re interested in social and behavioral sciences, and those are fields that require a lot of statistics. We see that your high school — you know, you say that you weren’t really strong in math in high school. Well, we’re going to require you, as part of your college-level statistics course, to take this supplemental two credit, which won’t count to your degree, but nevertheless, we found that this supplement will really help you succeed in statistics. And by the way, if you can master statistics, you’re going be employable in any industry in this area.” You know, compare the two experiences. One is like, “Here are the opportunities, you know. What are you interested in? We’re going to help you explore. And yes, social and behavioral sciences requires statistics, that’s why people have to get an education to get into it. We’re going to help you succeed.” Rather than, “Welcome to college. We’re going to show what the schools told you, which is that you’re not smart enough for college.” It’s a bit of a difference.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
Mark Franks, Dean, Enrollment Services, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Pathways College; Pam Gerstner, Associate Dean, General Studies, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
(1) At NWTC, we support students on their pathway by engaging them in an early alert system called Starfish. We have faculty completing progress reports or progress surveys at multiple times during the semester. They can also raise manual tracking items on students if they’re concerned about their ability to be successful. What’s really neat about this system is that staff can also raise what we call kudos, and we actually raise about two to one ratio of kudos to flags. So there’s a real sense of positive reinforcement for students in their courses. This is an opportunity for faculty to notify students that they’re concerned about their ability to be successful but also to notify resources on campus that this is a good time to intervene. We use referrals in this system to connect with different services, whether that might be academic coaching or mental health counseling or academic advising. And then they reach out with those students and try to provide some intervention and some support.
(2) Some other support that we provide to students in gateway courses also includes what we call faculty mentoring, which is also known as integrated advising. It’s a really wonderful model that really puts the faculty member who’s already working with the student in their core sections in kind of like an advising situation, but it’s a little bit different. It’s meant to complement the actual advising sessions that are occurring with the advisor. It really becomes a collaborative team effort between the advisor as well as the faculty member and the student. Really, it’s not just creating or implementing or helping them along their pathway, but sometimes even adjusting their pathway. So the discussions that are taking place, while could be specific to course related, they are also talking about where you’re gonna go from here after you complete my course successfully and tying it into their next sequence of coursework in addition to the overall program of coursework and then also reinforcing the number of different support services that we have for them. Then, from those conversations, understanding what further support they might need and then getting them connected through that Starfish system with those other supports.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
Ashley Van Heest, University Transfer Liaison, Jackson College, Pathways College (posted 4/5/2018)
A really impactful change that we’ve made, at least on the student services side of things, is the idea of being relational with students, rather than transactional with students. Our student success navigator model is the main driving factor behind that. They have a really robust outreach and intervention plan that they follow in terms of connecting with students. As we think about supports that students need, and the way that we get them access to those supports, it comes from having a relationship with the student. It comes from understanding that they are struggling with math, or that they’re nervous about taking psychology or biology. Knowing that about the student and having the relationship that allows us to know that about the student. Then being able to refer them to the resources that we have. Those resources on campus have always existed, it was just a matter of making sure that the student knew and understood that they could get a free tutor, that a supplemental instruction was available in math and some of these other things that we are pushing forward. Being relational, rather than transactional, has allowed us to embed those supports in another way, primarily through the student success navigators.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
STUDENT VOICES
(posted 10/1/2018)
My first semester I took an introductory statistics course that, at first, for the first couple weeks it really handed it to me, but every time that the class met, both the instructor and the SI there, which is a supplemental instruction assistant, basically, it’s a student that took the class before and succeeded very well in it. Every time the class met, they would let everybody know that there are additional meetings. And basically, an hour before each lecture, you could go and the SI there would be there to help you through the last class’s material and the worksheets and all that stuff. It really improved my overall class grade and also testing scores. I think, the first exam I failed miserably on. Then, from that, I started going to the SI meetings. From that point, I think my exam score increased by like 35 percentage points. Just the SI leader meetings really helped.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses
(posted 10/1/2018)
When I went to high school, I kind of like bounced around from school to school, so my writing wasn’t all that great. And, at my little college, they have this lady that comes in Monday and Wednesday, and she helps with writing. You can go see her. She like would refer different sources that you can go on, like Kahn Academy, and it would help you improve your writing and teach you grammar that you might have missed. Then, I had a math class. And they had this tutor, this one girl that would come in, and she’d sit in every class, and if you struggled with something in your math class, you just raise your hand and you’d ask her for help and she’d help you. So I thought that was really good.
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Contextualized, integrated academic support to help students pass program gateway courses