|
|
Community College Survey of Student Engagement
Based on our desire to learn more about student engagement in the learning process and with input from a group of faculty and division chairs, President Kickels announced in December that Paradise Valley Community College will administer the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE). In order to increase our understanding of how student engagement is measured, three CCSSE Briefings will be emailed to the college community over the next several weeks.
This is the second of those briefings:
What have other colleges learned from CCSSE?
STRATEGY 1
Engage Early, Engage Often
Community colleges typically lose about half of their students prior to the beginning of the sophomore year, and data indicate that most students who leave college before achieving their goals do so early in their collegiate experience.
Colleges can address this precipitous loss of students by designing engagement efforts that start from the moment of students’ first interactions with the college — and continue with powerful focus during their first few weeks and months as college students.
Such efforts can focus on students who likely are less familiar with negotiating a college campus, such as first-generation college students, who represent one-third (33%) of CCSSE respondents.
Intentional Engagement Strategies
Sinclair Community College (OH) increased retention rates after better marketing their learning support and financial aid services.
The Start Right program at Valencia Community College (FL) mandates developmental and prerequisite sequences, giving students a better chance at early success. In addition, application deadlines are enforced, and students are not added to classes after the class has met just once, so real work can begin on the first day.
Tallahassee Community College(FL) creates a positive, helpful environment at the beginning of each term. Throughout the campus, students can stop at information tents for help finding classes or other resources. Office employees wear “Ask Me” buttons, and faculty and staff create welcome stations stocked with refreshments, maps, and other information in academic building lobbies.
STRATEGY 2
Stress Academic Advising
Having a plan — a clear goal and a step-by-step strategy for attaining it — plays a critical role in students’ choosing to return to school the next day, next month, and next year. There are indications from college data that the simple act of declaring a major (a form of articulating a plan) can be a key factor in student persistence.
Thus, engagement efforts that encourage students to set and meet goals — such as academic and career advising — can have a significant impact on student retention and, ultimately, student success. Certainly the 17% of students who report that they are undecided about whether they will return to college after the current semester are likely candidates for such advising.
Unfortunately, more than a third (36%) of CCSSE respondents report that they rarely or never use academic advising/planning services, even though 88% cite advising as important. Nearly half of students (49%) report that they rarely or never use career counseling services.
Intentional Engagement Strategies
The LifeMap program at Valencia Community College (FL) provides developmental advising that supports student planning (for education, career, and life) and aims to strengthen students’ self-confidence and decision-making skills. Developmental advising refers to the process of making students self-sufficient. Faculty and staff are students’ advising partners, providing significant information and support initially. The expectation, however, is that as students gain experience they will increasingly take the lead in defining and implementing their educational and career goals until, ultimately, they are completely directing their own learning process. LifeMap includes a variety of electronic tools, including MyCareerPlanner and MyEducationPlan.
Sinclair Community College (OH) saw significant increases in new, at risk student persistence and success rates as a result of its Student Success Plan system, which stresses individual learning plans and includes counseling and intervention.
STRATEGY 3
Emphasize Effective Developmental Education
Almost 50% of all first-time community college students are assessed as under-prepared for the academic demands of college-level courses, and the numbers are far higher in some settings.* Colleges that design strategies to retain these students learn that effective remediation pays high dividends.
First and most important, students who benefit from effective developmental education will then have the opportunity to be successful in college level studies. The reality is that without developmental education to level the playing field, they will not have that opportunity.
In addition, most students who successfully complete the prescribed remedial course sequence become productively employed: 16% as professionals; 54% in mid-level, white-collar, or technical positions; and 20% as high-skill, blue-collar workers. Only 9% remain in unskilled or low-skill jobs.**
There is other good news: According to results on a variety of CCSSE items, developmental students appear to be more engaged in their community college experience than their academically prepared peers. For example, developmental students are significantly more likely to:
- 1. Talk about career plans with an instructor (26% vs. 19%).
- Prepare multiple drafts of assignments before turning them in (56% vs. 42%).
- Work harder than they thought they could to meet an instructor’s expectations (52% vs. 43%).
Indicate higher educational outcomes in nearly all areas. For example, when asked if their college experience contributed to their ability to think critically and analytically, 70% of developmental students answer “very much” or “quite a bit” as compared with 59% of academically prepared students.
They also report, unfortunately, that they are more likely to withdraw from college because they are academically unprepared or lack finances.
Prince George’s Community College (MD) requires aspiring college students who lack sufficient reading, writing, and computational skills to complete the college’s developmental program. The later academic performance of those who successfully complete the developmental program is as strong as the performance of students who never needed remediation.
Miami-Dade College (FL) has learning communities that combine mathematics and student life skills (SLS) courses. The math classes focus on math competencies while paying attention to study skills and habits. The SLS courses address time management, math anxiety reduction, test-taking strategies, learning styles, and self-confidence. This approach leads to math retention and pass rates that are consistently above the norm.
*Roueche, J.E., and S.D. Roueche, High Stakes, High Performance: Making Remedial Education Work. Washington, DC: Community College Press, 1999; Grubb, W.N., From Black Box to Pandora’s Box: Evaluating Remedial/ Developmental Education. CCRC Brief 11. New York: Community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, 2001.
**McCabe, R.H., No One to Waste: A Report to Public Decision Makers and Community College Leaders. Washington, DC: Community College Press, 2000.
STRATEGY 4
Redesign Educational Experiences
Most community college students work, nearly all commute, and many spend time caring for dependents. With these competing priorities, most students spend little time on campus. In fact, CCSSE data indicate that overall the most successful engagement strategies currently occur in classrooms.
This data notwithstanding, however, engagement does not have to be limited to in-classroom activities. Colleges can redesign educational experiences to promote engagement both in and out of the classroom. Every interaction with students presents the potential to engage them. Community colleges can make engagement inescapable by promoting engagement through each syllabus — each assignment, each course requirement, and each mode of assessment. They can require students to work on projects with other students outside of class, require a service learning project, require students to see faculty members in their offices at least once before mid-semester, make the end-of- course assessment a group project, and so on.
Colleges are using these and other approaches to design intentionally engaging experiences for their students. More and more colleges, for example, are structuring coursework around learning communities — multidisciplinary, highly interactive, linked courses that usually are team-taught. Many learning communities combine classes from two or more disciplines (e.g., world history and world literature), and students earn credit for both classes. Learning communities tend to emphasize collaborative work and student-directed work. Most include activities outside the classroom, as well, and they sometimes involve counselors or advisors who bring support services directly into the learning experience.
Intentional Engagement Strategies
Northwest Vista College (TX) uses learning communities to engage students in multidisciplinary environments. In the Weekend College learning community, for example, two or three disciplines are combined in a team-taught, multidisciplinary atmosphere. For their final project, the students — either as a whole class of 40–45 or in smaller groups of four to five students — develop a play that incorporates what they have learned in all of the disciplines over the entire semester. Working together, the students write the script, direct, act, make costumes and props, design lighting and sound, and create handouts.
Ideally, engagement happens both in and out of the classroom. To promote meaningful student-faculty interaction outside the classroom, faculty offices at Santa Fe Community College (FL) are in interdisciplinary units that combine private offices with comfortably furnished common areas that become sites for review sessions, informal advising, and intellectual discussions.
Commuter students at Prince George’s Community College (MD) can become members of a community of scholars when they participate in one of five Collegian Centers. These discipline-based centers provide faculty mentoring and advising, offer peer support and a place to belong, and emphasize scholarly activities and opportunities.
|
|
|
