Student success does not arise by chance

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Student  Success  Does  Not  Arise  By  Chance  

   Université  de  Montréal  

April  16,  2015  

Vincent    Tinto  DisCnguished  University  Professor  Emeritus  

Syracuse  University      

[email protected]  

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Lesson Learned: Improvement in rates of student success does not arise by chance. It requires an intentional, structured, and coordinated course of action that brings together the actions of many people, programs, and offices across campus.

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Improvement in rates

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Intentional Action:

✓ Establish goal of action

✓ Establish acceptable measure of goal

✓ Establish methods of measuring goal

✓  Identify actions to achieve goal

✓ Allocate resources to action

✓ Data driven decision making -  Evaluation and improvement of action

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✓ Clear organizational structure with defined lines of responsibility ✓ Office, committee, or person to guide, coordinate, and/or oversee action ✓ Linkage to other offices, programs, and persons

Structured Action:

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✓ Actions share common goal ✓ Actions complement and/or support one

another (e.g. cohesive action)

Coordinated Action:

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Improvement takes time and effort. It is one thing to begin an action, it is another to sustain that action and scale it up over time.

Lesson Learned:

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Sustaining & Scaling Up Action

➜ Evidence of outcome (quantitative & qualitative)

➜ Developing institutional commitment to invest additional resources

➜ Expanding circle of adoption - Planning for one’s replacement

- Convincing “others”

➜ Ongoing evaluation and adjustment

➜  Institutionalization of action

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No support is more important than that which facilitates students success in the classrooms of the university, especially during the critical first year of university study.

Lesson Learned:

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Supporting Student Success

➜ Expectations –  Clear, consistent, accurate information

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Supporting Student Success

➜ Expectations –  Clear, consistent, accurate information

–  High expectations

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Supporting Student Success

➜  Academic support

➜  Social support

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Providing Academic Support

•  Summer Bridge programs •  Student Success Centre

-  Student success courses •  Contextualized academic support

-  Supplemental instruction (University of Missouri-Kansas City)

-  Linked courses (e.g. University of Washington)

-  Adaptive learning (e.g. Gates Foundation)

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Supplemental Instruction (SI)

A B C D

Instructor

Tutor A Tutor B Tutor C Tutor D

Freshman English

Supplemental Study Groups

2020

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Linked Courses

ESL Language

Accounting

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“The relationship between accounting and ESL is helping a lot because the accounting professor is teaching us to answer questions in complete sentences, to write better. And we are more motivated to learn vocabulary because it is accounting vocabulary, something we want to learn about anyway. I am learning accounting better by learning the accounting language better.”

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First-Year Learning Community

Mathematics

Student Success Course Economics

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Providing Social Support

•  Counselors/Advisors•  Mentors (e.g. University of Michigan, University of New Mexico)

•  Cohort programs•  First-year learning communities (e.g. Colorado State)

•  Student clubs/organizations

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“In the cluster we knew each other, we were friends, we discussed everything from all the classes. We knew things very, very well because we discussed it all so much. We had discussions about everything… it was like a raft running the rapids of my life.”

Learning Communities and Social Support

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Supporting Student Success

➜ Assessment and Feedback -  Entry assessment and placement -  Early warning

•  Predictive Analytics (e.g. Purdue University, Univ. of Kansas) -  Classroom assessment

•  “One-minute” paper (Angelo & Cross, 1993) •  Automated response systems (e.g. Mazur, Harvard Univ.)

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Supporting Student Success

➜ Engagement – Contact with faculty, staff, and students – Active engagement in learning with others

– Building inclusive communities of learning

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Promoting Student Engagement

➜ Pedagogies of engagement

-  Cooperative/collaborative learning -  Problem/Project-based learning (e.g. University of

Delaware) ➜ Hybrid/Blended classrooms ➜ Cohort programs ➜ Learning communities (e.g. University of Washington) ➜ Service learning (e.g. Brown Univ., Duke Univ., Stanford

Univ.)

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“You know, the more I talk to other people about our class stuff, the homework, the tests, the more I’m actually learning... and the more I learn not only about other people, but also about the subject because my brain is getting more, because I’m getting more involved with the other students in the class. I’m getting more involved with the class even after class.”

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Engagement, Support and Learning

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“I think more people should be educated in this form of education. I mean because it is good. We learn not only how to interact with ourselves, but with other people of different races, different sizes, different colors, different everything.I mean it just makes it better...not only do you learn more, you learn better.”

Learning Better Together

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Closing Thought:

Student success is everyone’s business. It requires people to work together to build educational communities of belonging in which students will want to stay and learn.

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