Category: Blog

Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: First-Year Seminar for a Minority Cohort

ALSO READ Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Laying the Groundwork Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Leveraging Peer Leadership Boosting Retention for Ethnic Minority Students: Faculty Buy-in and Involvement For this fourth article in our series on supporting the academic success of underrepresented minority students, we interviewed Derek Moore, an academic success coach with Pulaski Technical College. Besides piloting a highly successful success coach program, Moore has taught the first-year seminar since 2007, both regular sections and targeted first-year seminars developed specifically for cohorts of minority students. In this article, we’ll share Moore’s tips for developing an effective first-year seminar for an African-American, lower-income student cohort. Rethinking the Common Reader “In many cases, the common reader could be used much more intentionally. The selection of it should be driven by the objectives of the first-year seminar.” Derek Moore, Pulaski Technical College Moore notes that while this is often the case in at least a general way, there is additional opportunity to: Focus the common reader on specific student learning outcomes (e.g., decision-making, critical thinking, time management, etc.) Identify a common reader that is relevant for your targeted courses Moore cites the example of one year in which two of […]

Getting Buy-in for Addressing Deferred Maintenance

Earlier this month, we surveyed the institutions planning to attend an Academic Impressions webcast on rethinking and prioritizing physical campus improvements. We asked questions about their balance of new capital projects and replacement and renewal, how they were handling issues with limited space capacity, and their level of commitment to addressing the deferred maintenance backlog. Of the facilities managers surveyed, 75 percent noted that addressing the deferred maintenance backlog was either a “high” or “highest” priority for the next 12 months. What’s interesting is that when we asked facilities managers the same question at the end of January this year, the percentage who assigned a high priority to deferred maintenance was 68 percent. While in the past the deferred maintenance backlog has been a perennially neglected issue, it is now rising steadily in its importance to an institution’s planning around physical campus improvements. EXPLORE THE FINDINGS For the findings from the January – February 2012 deferred maintenance survey, read our recent article “Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance.” In response to these findings, we asked Kambiz Khalili, the assistant vice chancellor for student affairs and the executive director of housing and dining services at the University of Colorado Boulder; Dan King, the assistant […]

Academic Success Coaching: Keys to an Effective Approach

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

Given voluminous research on the impact of individualized attention on at-risk students’ academic performance and persistence, more institutions are innovating new ways to leverage both peer mentors and professional academic success coaches. To learn more about the second approach (which has not yet been as widely adopted), we reached out to Derek Moore, a key player in the success coach program at Pulaski Technical College. Pulaski has success coaches on seven campuses, and the coaches report to the institution’s dean of enrollment. The program has seen some success, and Moore shared with us some of its key features. Smaller colleges especially, as well as institutions serving nontraditional student populations, may want to take note. Much of the program’s features are replicable, and it is possible to start on a small scale — with just a few coaches and a brief questionnaire to serve as a needs assessment — and then build up over time. Here is one model for providing effective academic success coaching. The Triage Approach Moore outlined for us the thinking behind Pulaski Technical College’s academic success coach program. The program takes a “triage” approach, offering three levels of coaching: The case management approach involves the coach partnering […]

Predicting Student Success: When SAT and GPA Are Not Enough

Historical efforts by admissions officers and enrollment managers to assess a student’s potential for high academic performance and academic persistence have focused on cognitive potential, measured most frequently by past academic performance (high school GPA) and standardized test scores (SAT, ACT). Yet there is a growing awareness among enrollment managers (driven and confirmed by the research of recent years) that these two measures, taken by themselves, offer limited predictive accuracy. “Scores and high school GPA only account for about 20 percent of the variability we see in student outcomes. Some students with a respectable GPA and high scores underperform academically in college and drop out, while other students who appear academically under-prepared then proceed to perform highly. This means that some of the students you are losing are in good academic standing. They don’t appear to be “at-risk students.” To ensure that programming to improve student success is effective, we need better predictors of student success.”Paul Gore, University of Utah To learn more, we turned to Paul Gore, who serves as the student success special projects coordinator at the University of Utah in addition to his roles as professor, training director for graduate counseling programs, and director of institutional research. […]

International Student Success: The Missing Piece

At a recent Academic Impressions webcast on internationalizing the college campus, we surveyed 53 North American institutions of higher education to learn about their efforts and their most significant challenges in integrating international students into campus life. In other surveys over the past few years, international students themselves have cited this integration and acculturation as both key to their success as students — and largely missing from their college experience. (For more information, read our April 2011 article “Supporting International Student Success.”) When we asked colleges about their efforts to assist in student success and integration, the results were revealing: Three-quarters of those institutions surveyed indicated that they had put in place orientation programming specifically for international students, as well as providing writing center resources and staff trained to assist learners for whom English is a second language. However, very few institutions offered other forms of support with integration into the campus community. Only one-third offered their students (whether international or domestic) training and development in intercultural competencies. Fewer institutions offered any coaching on intercultural competencies to faculty and staff. Darla Deardorff, the executive director of the Association of International Education Administrators (AIEA), a research scholar in education at Duke […]

Improving Faculty Advising

Over the past nine months, Academic Impressions has conducted several surveys of academic deans, department chairs, and directors of advising to investigate current trends in developing and assessing both faculty advisors and professional advisors. Among the key findings: Yet we also confirmed that over three-quarters of institutions surveyed rely heavily on faculty advisors (even if they also employ some professional advising staff). While there are many resources available for training and developing professional advising staff, faculty advisors often receive little or no training — yet they provide most of the advising services at colleges and universities in the US. Improving faculty advising is thus a critical and often neglected step toward improving student retention and supporting students’ academic success. This week, we asked Tom Grites, past president of NACADA and assistant to the provost at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, for his advice on the subject. Grites suggests: Establish Agreement on the Goals of Advising “The institution has to reach some level of agreement on what advising is. The smaller the campus, the easier it may be to establish an institution-wide definition. At a larger university, where different kinds of advising structures come into play, strive for consensus within […]

Missed Opportunities in First-Year Seminars

Jennifer Latino, the director of first-year experience at Campbell University, recently shared with us three ways to help peer educators succeed; in a follow-up interview, she spoke with us to identify some frequently missed opportunities in the design and execution of first-year seminars. Latino highlighted the need to: Review your own institution’s student data, rather than relying on trends or on practices from peer institutions Invite parents’ participation in the first-year student experience in meaningful ways Involve faculty more directly in the first-year seminar Keep the Focus on the Unique Needs of Your Current Students “It’s easy to get too comfortable with the first-year seminar,” Latino warns. “Often, when I’m speaking with representatives of institutions that have had seminars in place for 10 or 15 years, the missed opportunity is that institutions continue to focus on the same learning outcomes they identified years ago, without pausing to check if those outcomes still respond to the needs of their current students. It’s also a risk to attend too closely to what your peer institutions are doing — without checking that against the needs of your own student body.” Take a look at what your seminar spends the most time on — […]

Planning and Budgeting: Critical Advice for the President and Cabinet

This week, we interviewed Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group, who has worked with dozens of institutions to coach them through a collaborative and effective strategic planning and budgeting process. We wanted to ask what advice he would most want college and university presidents and members of their cabinets to hear. This is what Sanaghan shared with us. Academic Impressions (AI): What is the one perspective you would most want to share with college and university leaders, related to strategic planning and budgeting? Pat Sanaghan: After 30 years, what I’ve found is that the level of trust in the system is the single most critical factor in the success of a planning and budgeting process. If the level of trust in the process is low, then the president and other leaders of the institution need to work intentionally to build a higher level of trust, or the plan won’t be implemented. You need other things — you need transparency, you need effective leadership, good data, an external, environmental scan — but the most critical thing is trust. If you have high trust, people across the institution are more willing to share both their aspirations and their fears. They will be more willing to […]

Innovations in Course Scheduling that Support Student Success

  This week, we interviewed Joe Murray, the director of academic advising and retention services at Miami University Hamilton Campus, about innovations in course scheduling that can help maximize the impact of early alert intervention and proactive or intrusive advising. A number of these approaches have been piloted at Miami University or soon will be. Murray shared the following models with us. Late-Start Courses for the Core Curriculum Institutions investing in early alert intervention or intrusive advising may identify students who are underprepared for a particular course and need to switch to a different one. The problem most students in this position face is that by the time they realize this, it is too late to secure a place in another course they need and get a successful start in that course. Murray recommends offering late-start course sections that begin several weeks into the term. Many institutions offer these for elective courses, but to leverage this model in a way that supports student success, you need to offer late-start courses for your core requirements. For example, consider a student who is registered for Algebra II, and realizes two or three weeks into the term that they will need to refresh […]

Taking a Proactive Approach to Advising for At-Risk Students

In this first of several articles, Academic Impressions is interviewing leading experts on proactive approaches to academic advising. Over the course of the series, we will look at interventions early on the academic calendar and innovations in course scheduling that support intervention with at-risk students. “By the time a student realizes they’re in trouble and asks an academic advisor for help, it’s usually too late for anything other than a conversation about dropping. The more you can front-load outreach into pre-term or start-of-term communications, the more options the advising office has to offer students.”Joe Murray, Miami University Joe Murray, the director of academic advising and retention services at Miami University Hamilton Campus, is acutely aware of the issue; his institution is open-enrollment, with many adult learners, first-generation students, and academically underprepared students. With a large number of students who could be designated “at risk,” Murray recognizes the critical importance of taking a proactive approach. Murray advocates an “intrusive advising” approach. Based on the research of Robert Glennen, intrusive advising focuses on early outreach and mandatory advising for at-risk students. When we interviewed Murray this week, his primary suggestion was that a one-on-one, personal connection early on the academic calendar will […]