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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 […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]