24 research outputs found
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Developmental Reading and English Assessment in a Researcher-Practitioner Partnership
This paper reports findings from a researcher-practitioner partnership that assessed the readiness for postsecondary reading and writing demands of 211 students in developmental reading and English courses in two community colleges. An assessment battery was designed for the study, comprising two standardized tests and five project-developed tasks. The project-developed measures were two text-based writing tasks similar to those typically assigned in college classrooms (a summarization task and a persuasive essay), a self-efficacy scale, a teacher judgment questionnaire, and a qualitative student retrospective report. The text-based writing measures were keyed to high-enrollment, introductory-level general education courses that had significant literacy demands.
The results pointed to areas where students needed improvement in order to be ready for literacy tasks at the introductory postsecondary level. There was a discrepancy between the relatively low reading and writing skills as assessed through performance tasks and relatively high student self-efficacy ratings and teacher judgments. This finding suggests the possibility of an unrealistic amount of confidence in students’ ability to perform college-level reading and writing tasks. Correlations between assessment measures tended to be moderate, suggesting that the measures were tapping different skills. A series of hierarchical regressions modeling the text-based writing skills suggested that improvement in text-based summarization may require particular attention to reading comprehension skills, while improvement in text-based persuasive essay writing may depend more on developing general writing skills. Students’ retrospective reports indicated that although participants had some difficulty stating the requirements of the summarization task, they described appropriate strategies to complete it. Overall, the study’s findings point to the need to examine approaches to instruction, curriculum, course structure, and placement policy that may improve students’ college readiness
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Student Attitudes Toward Technology-Mediated Advising Systems
The literature on broad-access colleges suggests that low persistence and completion rates may be improved through better advising that employs a teaching-as-advising approach. While resource constraints have traditionally limited the ability of colleges to reform advising practices, technological advances have made it possible to implement technology-based advising tools, some of which can replace face-to-face services.
Using focus group interview data from 69 students at six colleges, this study investigates students’ attitudes toward technology-mediated advising. More specifically, the authors seek to understand how students’ perceptions and experiences vary across different advising functions. They find that students are open to using technology for more formulaic tasks, such as course registration, but prefer in-person support for more complex tasks, such as planning courses for multiple semesters and refining their academic and career goals
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Redesigning Advising With the Help of Technology: Early Experiences of Three Institutions
A rapidly growing number of higher education institutions nationwide are implementing advising technologies—including education planning, counseling and coaching, and risk targeting technologies—to help students plan their academic paths and stay on track to graduation. Research suggests that these technologies may improve support for students if institutions also adopt advising structures and processes that leverage technology to provide a more intensive and personalized advising experience.
This report from CCRC and MDRC describes how the University of North Carolina, Charlotte; California State University, Fresno; and Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania are approaching comprehensive, technology-based advising reforms, presenting detailed examples of their new advising practices, outreach methods, and messages to students. Based on observations of the advising redesigns at these three institutions, the report provides insights and ideas for other institutions seeking to redesign their advising practices around new technologies
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English Learners and ESL Programs in the Community College: A Review of the Literature
Demographic and postsecondary enrollment data suggest that the proportion of community college students who need support to access curricula in English is large and will continue to grow in the coming years. Yet there is limited research on the postsecondary experiences and outcomes of these English learners, and most of the studies that are available focus exclusively on the subset of English learners who enroll in ESL courses.
Informed by relevant research literature, this paper examines factors within the community college context that affect the experiences and academic outcomes of the English learner population broadly and, given that they can be more easily identified and have been the subject of much more study, students who enroll in ESL courses in particular. The paper describes English learners and their academic needs and strengths and provides a brief discussion of the national and state policy landscape regarding English learner students. It then provides perspectives from the research literature on ESL assessment and placement, instructional delivery, and student identity. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the implications of these findings for policy, practice, and future research.
In June 2019 small revisions were made on pp. 13 and 16 of this paper to better clarify the influence of Assembly Bill 705 on English learners in California
Student Attitudes toward Technology-Mediated Advising Systems
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The literature on broad-access colleges suggests that low persistence and completion rates may be improved through better advising that employs a teaching-as-advising approach. While resource constraints have traditionally limited the ability of colleges to reform advising practices, technological advances have made it possible to implement technology-based advising tools, some of which can replace face-to-face services. Using focus group interview data from 69 students at six colleges, this study investigates students’ attitudes toward technology-mediated advising. More specifically, we seek to understand how students’ perceptions and experiences vary across different advising functions. We find that students are open to using technology for more formulaic tasks, such as course registration, but prefer in-person support for more complex tasks, such as planning courses for multiple semesters and refining their academic and career goals.
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Integrating Technology and Advising: Studying Enhancements to Colleges’ iPASS Practices
Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) is an initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to support colleges seeking to incorporate technology into their advising and student services. In iPASS, such technology is intended to increase advising’s emphasis on a student’s entire college experience, enabling advisors to more easily:
intervene when students show early warning signs of academic and nonacademic challenges,
regularly follow up as students progress through college,
refer students to tutoring and other support services when needed, and
provide personalized guidance that reflects students’ unique needs.
MDRC and CCRC partnered with three institutions already implementing iPASS—California State University, Fresno; Montgomery County Community College; and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte—to study how technology can support advising redesign, employing a randomized controlled trial research design. The three institutions increased their emphasis on providing timely support, boosted their use of advising technologies, and used administrative and communication strategies to increase student contact with advisors.
The enhancements generally produced only a modestly different experience for students in the program group compared with students in the control group, although at one college, the enhancements did substantially increase the number of students who had contact with an advisor. Consequently, it is not surprising that the enhancements have so far had no discernible positive effects on students’ academic performance. Nonetheless, some staff members indicated in interviews that implementing and enhancing iPASS has enabled their institution to take steps toward a stronger system to support students and help them succeed
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Five Years Later: Technology and Advising Redesign at Early Adopter Colleges
In 2015, 26 broad-access two- and four-year colleges from various regions across the nation began steps to adopt or enhance technology-mediated advising practices in an effort to improve the way they support students. These institutions were part of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) initiative, aimed at promoting technology-supported advising redesign with implementation guidance from Achieving the Dream and EDUCAUSE.
Understanding the iPASS colleges’ long engagement in advising reform provides insights about sustainable and scalable redesign strategies that may work well at other institutions. Based on interviews with college personnel, this brief discusses the iPASS colleges’ experiences, achievements, and challenges. The authors’ findings align with and build on CCRC’s previous iPASS and advising redesign research, which recognizes several elements connected with successful redesign efforts: the importance of strong support from senior leadership; a focus beyond technology adoption that considers structural changes at the college that are central to the student experience and advising practice; and a clear shift in outreach and communication with students—both in-person and electronically—that is more targeted and personalized. This brief also discusses how the early adopter colleges have worked with technology vendors, the ways in which they have leveraged internal resources to move the redesign work forward, and how they have maintained momentum in reform over a substantial period of time
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Lessons Learned From Advising Redesigns at Three Colleges
This report presents findings on the implementation of a technology-mediated advising redesign within the context of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) at three institutions—the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, California State University at Fresno, and Montgomery County Community College. These colleges aimed to improve their advising systems using a three-pronged approach: expanding informational communications to students, identifying and supporting students who are struggling, and improving advising sessions.
Though the RCT did not find significant changes in quantitative student outcomes such as grade point average, qualitative fieldwork suggests that stakeholders across the three institutions gained valuable experiences that may provide lessons for other colleges considering advising reforms. In this report, the authors explore how advisors adjusted their approach to advising work, how they used relevant tools and resources, and some of the challenges that arose during the redesign’s implementation.
Based on these implementation findings, the authors offer several suggestions for other colleges entering this work:
Acknowledge up front that technology alone cannot resolve advising and student support issues, nor can it replace face-to-face conversations about education and career planning.
Consider ways to encourage or make it easier for students to self-report concerns.
Call for input from advisors, faculty, students, and communications or marketing teams on the content of risk-related messages and alerts.
Consider alternatives to registration holds to incentivize students to meet with an advisor, as registration holds may have unintended consequences.
Give advisors the time, resources, and professional development to proactively engage with students.
Provide ongoing support for staff in implementing reformed advising practices
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Helping Underserved Students at Higher Performing iPASS Colleges: An Exploration of Support Practices
Good advising and support services are instrumental in helping college students—especially Black, Latinx, and low-income learners—stay in school and complete a college credential. The authors of this report analyzed KPI (key performance indicator) data from iPASS institutions and chose five colleges with comparatively strong outcomes among underserved student groups for further study, with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of how the colleges provide advising and student support both inside and outside of the classroom. The authors describe how the climate of the colleges affects student experiences, and examine practices the colleges have been undertaking to improve outcomes and prioritize equity across racial and socioeconomic subgroups. The authors also detail situational factors, including the pandemic and the fraught political climate at the time of data collection, that their research suggests may have both catalyzed efforts to promote racial equity and slowed progress in improving supports aimed at underserved students. The report is accompanied by a standalone resource guide that describes and provides hyperlinks to useful relevant resources at each of the five colleges
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How Colleges Use Integrated Planning and Advising for Student Success (iPASS) to Transform Student Support
This paper examines technology-mediated advising reform in order to contribute to the understanding of how colleges engage in transformative change to improve student outcomes. The authors conceptualize transformation as occurring along three interrelated dimensions of organizational functioning--structural, process, and attitudinal--and identify conditions that encourage or discourage transformation using pre/post data from six colleges deploying integrated planning and advising for student success (iPASS). Three of the six colleges made steps toward transforming their student support delivery. Four contextual features appear to underpin colleges’ likelihood of transformative reform: technology and vendor relationships, reform vision and rationale, leadership, and the college’s orientation toward student success. These findings support Karp and Fletcher’s (2014) hypothesis that technology is necessary but not sufficient for transformation, and that project-level and organizational factors are perhaps more important. Moreover, technology can spur substantial institutional change, but only under certain circumstances