Coordinators assess data in student success and implement first program
Steve Duncan
-Staff Writer-
Nearly 25 percent of students in community colleges leave school during the first year. Achieving the Dream (ATD) is focused on improving that.
In the spring of 2010, STLCC joined ATD, a national initiative committed to helping more students succeed, and designed a Student Success Team made up of faculty and staff to develop strategies to improve student success, close achievement gaps and increase retention and completion rates. STLCC implemented its first step toward improving student success before the Fall 2011 semester.
“Achieving the Dream sets a framework, sets some timelines and brings in help – brings in the ideas from other Achieving the Dream colleges, so we’re kind of like a coalition,” STLCC-Meramec President George Wasson said. “It brings the college to a focus.”
The program costs the district $75,000 per year for three years, which pays for support from consultants, registration to learning events and participation in ATD’s network. It aims to make initiatives that work empirically a part of the college by making a program out of it.
“We’ve got lots of excellent things that people have done to help students, but it’s been an individual initiative,” Wasson said. “For something to become part of the college you have to basically institutionalize it.”
Since its first meeting on Sept. 9, 2010, STLCC’s ATD Student Success Team has analyzed data to look for trends in student success.
Fourteen percent of students leave their first semester without earning a credit, according to ATD data. Data shows the first priority for STLCC is what happens to most students in the first semester of their first year of college, according to ATD Coach Kay McClenney, Ph.D.
“We look at data that paint a picture about where we’re losing students,” McClenney said. “That helps us then diagnose where we need to focus institutional energy and effort and resources in order to have the biggest positive impact on the largest possible number of students. We need to focus on the front door and the early experience.”
At Meramec, Rhonda Adams coordinates student orientation and transition into college. Adams describes the process in three steps: “Get ready, get set and go.”
“What we are attempting to do is make this process a seamless process from the time students walk in the door – getting them ready in terms of preregistration all the way to the time class starts,” Adams said.
First, when the students come in to register they learn all of the steps of the process, including how to select an academic plan and paying for classes, according to Adams.
The next step is student success: how to be successful in classes, the support systems that are available to students, how to navigate Banner Self-Service, how to communicate with instructors, how to survive the first week of class and how to add and drop a class, according to Adams.
The third step will be a college success course and is under development.
“Starting in the summer, there was a team of people that came together and did something called integrated course design,” said Teresa Huether, mathematics professor and ATD senior project associate. “You begin by asking what you want your students to remember two years after taking the course, and then work backwards.”
The plan is for the course to be mandatory in the fall for students who test into a developmental reading course or a developmental English course, according to Huether.
“As students know how to be a successful student they’ll be more inclined to stick around for the spring semester,” Huether said.
The fourth strategy that STLCC is focusing on and will have the biggest impact on students is the redesign of developmental education, according to Huether.
Forty-one percent of students entering community colleges are underprepared in at least one of the basic skills, such as reading, English or math, according to http://communitycollegecentral.org.
“We know that if you start in the lowest level of math your chances of getting a degree are very slim. If you start in the lowest level of reading, you have about a 6 percent chance of making it into college-level [math] and being successful in your first college level classes — that’s not working,” Wasson said.
Furthermore, developmental education students at two-year colleges are 39 percent less likely than their prepared counterparts to persist and earn a degree or certificate, according to http://communitycollegecentral.org.
“There are certain aspects we’re looking at: One is that we know people are not making it through the sequence,” Wasson said. “It’s taking too long to go through the sequence. How can we accelerate that?”
One program STLCC has piloted is the Math Boot Camp. The course is for students who have completed advanced math courses in high school, yet test into developmental math. The boot camp allows students to retake Accuplacer after a four-day review of math concepts.
A large proportion of students who participated in the Math Boot Camp were able to move up at least one level of math, saving a whole semester and even a year in some cases, according to Wasson.
Another strategy STLCC is looking at is modularization of developmental education courses. Modularization breaks a class up into sections or modules.
For example, a course may be separated into five modules. If a student is only deficient in two of five modules, they may complete those two modules and advance to the next level, according to Wasson.
The third area is contextualization: for example, linking the reading class to another area of study, such as psychology or biology.
Skills learned through contextualized reading are more likely to transfer into future courses, according to Christine Padberg, assistant professor of English and adjunct faculty coordinator at Meramec.
“There is research that says that students who come out of a developmental reading course are able to carry over what they learn for one semester, and then it falls off,” Padberg said.
Most students who enter into developmental education never get out, McClenney said. The sooner students enter into a program of study that they are interested in the more likely they are to succeed.
“We’re talking about really getting past some of the constraints some of us have in our heads about developmental education and redesigning with evidence in mind and from the student perspective,” McClenney said.
