Nominated for 2018 LRC Exemplary Practice:
Learning Resource Center: Faculty, Administrators, Tutors, or Paraprofessional Staff who work in a tutoring center, student support center, or other
Academic Initiative Review (AIR) | Tutoring
Valencia College
Laura Blasi and Karen Reilly
This past year a team of faculty and staff members at Valencia College were engaged in a six month process at Valencia College called an “Academic Initiative Review” (AIR) specifically focused on our college-wide tutoring services (Feb.-Aug. 2017). Valencia College serves roughly 75,000 students a year across seven campus locations and in this distributed system students are able to access a range of tutoring services, including writing centers, foreign language labs, and our online tutoring services. This evaluative AIR process has been used at the college annually for the past three years and draws upon More to Most: Scaling Up Effective Community College Practices by Abby Parcell at MDC combined with several other resources.
While many of the steps are standard for rigorous program evaluations (i.e. Grayson, 2012) we have actively engaged a Data Team of faculty and staff in several key activities and this is essential to the process and go beyond the standard steps taken in a program evaluation. Over the course of several meetings the Data Team collaboratively (a) developed a college-wide definition for tutoring; (b) defined a working theory to articulate our collective beliefs about what we are doing and why; (c) created research questions and data requests; and (d) analyzed the data, keeping in mind the college’s commitment to serving at-risk student populations. This focus is essential to the AIR review.
When the process was first piloted by Laura Blasi and Robyn Brighton in 2015 for our learning communities program, we identified five populations of students at-risk based on college-wide data. First time-in-college students, unsurprisingly, were one of those populations. The commitment to at-risk students then becomes a lens through which we view the data. Instead of diving into the data and seeing the patterns that emerge (for example “Who is performing well and who is not?”) we look specifically for those at-risk populations to see where and when they perform the best and we ask why, using focus groups and interviews whenever possible. In this way it becomes possible to scale up effective practices to better serve specifically identified at-risk students.
Overall the involvement of a Data Team at Valencia is a familiar practice first implemented during our work with the Achieving the Dream (AtD) initiative. Within the AIR process the participants connect the review process to our Five-Year Impact plan (which has a goal focused on equity). These Data Team contributors are also often front-line staff and give voice to the different challenges and opportunities that are evident at each campus location. The Data Teams are specifically designed to create a community of stakeholders who will shape and later carry out some of the recommendations that emerge.
For our Tutoring AIR we began with (1) a literature review, (2) adapted strategies from the online “More to Most” handbook*, and we called together (3) a cross-college Data Team to raise research questions and analyze data in conversation. These tasks occurred over the course of three meetings, (two hours each). Our initial work was then reviewed by (4) an external evaluator, Elizabeth Zachry Rutschow at MDRC (https://www.mdrc.org/about/elizabeth-zachry-rutschow), in order to provide an external point-of-view specific to learning support services. She visited with the Data Team, reviewed data alongside us, and provided an external reviewer report using a format we created for the AIR process.
The final report (attachment) with its recommendations was submitted to the Campus Presidents in November of 2017. Through the process of the Tutoring AIR we identified many areas of effectiveness that we can now focus on scaling up, and we were able to note specific areas where we can serve our at-risk students more effectively. A published framework for tutoring (Frey and Reigeluth, 1986), that was discovered through our research, will help us to not only scale up our effective services but to assure coherence across the multiple locations and campuses of Valencia. Enhanced consistency will also be evidenced by the nationally recognized standards we identified in the field to restructure our staff training as outlined in the “Standards for Tutoring Programs” (Center for Prevention Research and Development, 2009).
Lastly, in addition to pedagogies, marketing, communication, and messaging of our services were noted as important next steps in connecting our students with support areas. SUMMARY Taken together the steps of the AIR process are ones that we believe can be adapted for use at other state colleges and several findings emerged specific to tutoring that may also be of use at other institutions. One of the goals of the work was to maximize student learning and success, which is line with the mission of the Florida College System. There is often enthusiasm for developing and implementing pilot projects in higher education, however it seems like there are far fewer steps being taken to pinpoint areas of effectiveness and scale them up – especially with a focus on better serving at-risk students. The AIR process offers a structured set of steps to advance this work and our recent results focused on tutoring can support other state colleges as they also seek to enhance student learning and success.
* More2Most was developed with funding from the Lumina Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as part of the Developmental Education Initiative (DEI), an $18 million initiative to scale up effective developmental education practices at community colleges.
Works Cited
Center for Prevention Research and Development. (2009). Background Research: Tutoring Programs. Champaign, IL: Center for Prevention Research and Development, Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois.
Frey, L., & Reigeluth, C.M. (1986). Instructional models for tutoring: A review. Journal of Instructional Development, 9, 2-8.
Grayson, T. E., (2012). Program evaluation in higher education. In Secolsky, C., & Denison, D.B., (Editors), Handbook on Measurement, Assessment, and Evaluation in Higher Education. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group Publications, NY.