Taxonomy of Leaming Support Services by Gene Kerstiens, Andragogy Associates

During the past quarter-century, we have seen a considerable number of publications dealing with learning support services. But yet to appear are the results based on an authentic survey classifying these various programs according to what they do -- the learning theory they espouse, the populations they propose to assess and serve, or the methods and staff they employ to obtain intended outcomes.

Nor is the writing at hand the result of a survey claiming objectivity or consensual validation. Rather, it emerges from personal experience during the same 25-year period: attending regional and national conferences, reading the professional literature, visiting and studying more than 200 program sites, interacting with colleagues, surfing the Internet, and, perhaps more pertinent to the present topical focus, regularly noting the employment requirements and preferences listed in position announcements and job descriptions. Awaiting a more detached study, this inevitably biased attempt at classification renders ftve types. These categories are presented neither as models nor as paradigms. But the nature and proportion of policies and practices perceived as specific to each type do rather clearly distinguish each from the others.

Developmental Programs

Developmental programs, sometimes referenced as developmental studies or developmental departments, regard students' readiness to experience the rigors of college-level classes to be a chief consideration. Perceiving reading, writing, and mathematics to be areas of insufficiency that frequently cause learning problems, those workng in developmental progams tend to rely on assessment instruments that measure these basic skills in order to place students in preparatory classes or programs. Developmental programs do not, however, always confine their learning support services exclusively to classrooms or courses. Neverthless, their principal bill of offerings are likely to center on mandatory assignment of underprepared students to developmental courses In order to advance them in the curriculum. Confidence that assessing students' proficiencies early-on and improving specific skills in corridor interventions before their exposure to what is considered a rigorous curriculum serves as rationale for developmental programs.

Accordingly, it is not uncommon to encounter directors and other staff serving developmental programs enlisted from the ranks of the instructional component of the institution. In contrast to some other learning support directors and practitioners, they are more likely to be housed as faculty in their own department and/or as a separate instructional unit. And as faculty are accustomed to functioning in classes measured in semester/quarter time frames, developmental services incline toward a course/curricular avenue to enrollment in courses with prerequisites.

Leaning Assistance Centers

Learning assistance or learning centers also regard basic skills proficiencies -- reading, writing, math, listening, notetakng, test-taking skills-- as strong contributors to student success. But even though their facilities resemble developmental services types in this and other ways, several features distinguish them from each other. Disposed to view basic skills assessment instruments with somewhat less confidence, learning assistance staff favor discretionary or voluntary referral to mandatory placement. Therefore, they place emphasis on offerings designed to help students who encounter difficulty at any time in their academic careers. Noticing that even those students whose measured skills levels that are healthy are liable to encounter serious learning difficulties in higher level courses, they offer more open-ended, open-exit services. This flexibility of scheduling is designed to offer support as unanticipated learning problems present themselves while courses causing difficulty are in progress. Consequently more varied measures such as handouts, workshops, minicourses, mediated programs, content tutoring, and more diverse strategies customarily are available in a central location where students with various problems and levels of skill attainment work side by side. It is felt that the variety of learning resources and democratic client mix synergistically promotes motivation and minimizes stigma sometimes attached to segregated, corridor classes.

Learning center directors and their staff also are inclined to be transfers from the instructional side of the academy. However, they may comprise a more independent group of practitioners who, being interdisciplinary by nature, do not seek a home as a separate departmental entity but typically remain, like librarians, providers in a generic service facility.

Learning Resource Centers

From a learning theory perspective, learning resources contrast sharply with the first two types discussed. So does the service they provide. They effect to deliver alternative instruction to intelligent, well motivated students who, because their learning styles are special or because of diagnosed learning disabilities, will not or cannot improve their basic skills. These students seek other ways of learning that are more effective. To accommodate these distinct learning styles, learning resource staff house, circulate, and otherwise make available a host of supplemental materials serving students who learn differently but who are enrolled in content courses whose traditional, lecture-classroom-textbook delivery is unintelligible to or awkward for them. Additionally, learning resource centers also may provide mediated content courses rendered via audio cassette, radio, video (including telecourses), CAI, multimedia, distance learning, teleconferencing, and, more recently, modem based courses and instruction available on the Internet. Enrollment is voluntary, and courses completed through mediated delivery are awarded credit with the same weight as courses offered traditionally.

Not surprisingly, staff choosing or chosen to provide these services are trained to procure, catalogue, secure, distribute, and otherwise manage such materials -- librarians or those prepared specifically to administer learning resources. And regularly these services are available in a learning resource center sometimes considered a subsidiary of the library.

Student Development Services

Aware that student success and retention are often related to factors in the affective domain, those working in student development programs direct their energies to emotional matters that can interfere with or enhance academic performance and student life. Their inclination is to view student readiness for higher education as acculturating to the academic world's traditions, policies, ethics, protocol, and opportunities for negotiation and acceptance. They see their mission as helping students accommodate to academic life, feeling comfortable and effective in an envirorment that otherwise might prove unfamiliar or threatening. Accordingly, under their management we find voluntary, ongoing programs involving individual and group counseling, re-entry services, drug and alcohol abuse seminars, first-year experience programs, accommodative services for student athletes, high school to college articulation services, and opportunities for building relationships and community in cooperative learning programs.

Those appointed as student development faculty and staff are customarily enlisted from student affairs, counseling and guidance, or student personnel services. Given their focus on student retention, lately we find their mission related to that of the director of enrollment management, dean of students, and director of student life.

Compensatory Programs

Compensatory programs are designed to successfully sustain minority students in the life of the institution by providing, financial, personal, and academic support. Students qualify for these programs on the basis of minority racial or ethnic status, economic need, educational disadvantagement, or classification as being first generation to attend college. The result of affirmative action legislation, these programs are identified acronimically such as TRIO, EOP, and VEA Disadvantaged. While promoting an environment of multicultural pluralism, they provide intensive help through basic skills instruction, tutoring, counseling, and culturally enriching activities such as field trips to galleries and museums as well as visits to theatrical and musical performances. Purposefully assigned to assist these populations. directors and staff coordinate retention strategies in conjunction with the factulty and non-teaching professional staff.

Perhaps appropriately, directors, faculty and staff appointed to serve students in compensatory programs are those with the capacity to understand and deal with the distinct problems of minority students. It is not unusual, therefore, that directors of these are chosen from representatives of a population who have experienced and successfully coped with the special academic problems their clients encounter.

An Integrated Model Proposal

Of course, the foregoing descriptions are brief and therefore understandably incomplete. Readers will ask about other auxiliary student support services and how these are organized within or without the five types listed above. Writing centers, math labs, computer labs, tutoring services, and supplemental instruction figure in the student support mix, some of these as integral segments of a type, some of them as independent academic entities serving the student body at large. Again, there are probably in existence no distinctly 'pure' examples of learning support types as described here. Given a campus's architectural ironies, the political climate, turf rivalry, or the inevitably changing chairs of institutional power, in many cases, the services offered by one type are subsumed by another so that the mix of services that a programatic type delivers can lack reasonable direction or sometimes logic itself.

However, that the complete array of services and strategies are needed on most campuses and that ideally services should be integrated to provide the most efficient and effective support for students is apparent. Therefore the following diagram exhibiting such an integrated model is reproduced for readers' consideration.