Academic Success Center Outreach
Joseph Huston
Seminole State College, Sanford/Lake Mary Campus
At Seminole State College, we have developed the Academic Success Center (ASC) Outreach program to establish strategic partnerships for course-integrated academic support across the college. Implementing an integrated academic support partnership model has enabled us to achieve our goals of increasing student engagement with academic support services, improving student performance outcomes, and leveraging existing resources to enhance service availability, quality, and impact, without increase operating costs.
Purpose and Scope of Project
The ASC Outreach program enables academic support staff to work collaboratively with faculty and academic administration to address challenges within strategically identified courses. Through this model, we are able to engage students who might otherwise not participate in our traditional academic support programs, creating pathways toward the inclusive engagement of all students, while equalizing opportunities for learning and successful program completion. Through cross-department collaboration, we have developed customized, course-integrated academic support partnerships with departments and programs including accounting, business information management, legal studies, English, mathematics, fine and performing arts, biological and physical sciences, nursing, pharmacy technology, adult education, engineering technology, fire science, and construction and design.
Method and Implementation
Faculty, academic leadership, and Institutional Research staff help to identify strategic opportunities for courses in which student performance outcomes are lower or where specific learning needs emerge from student course performance. In developing course-integrated academic support strategies, we embraced the following principles:
1. Faculty are content area experts and own the course design process. Our role is to support their efforts and propose options for enhancing student learning and performance through interventions and strategies
2. Our work will focus on enhancing student engagement, learning, and academic performance while maintaining the faculty intended rigor of the course.
3. Our proposed initiatives will embrace a dedication to the inclusion of all students.
4. We strive to maximize student engagement, developing effective, cost efficient initiatives.
The grass-roots nature of these partnership efforts has been essential to allowing authentic relationships to emerge, predicated on trust and past accomplishments. Beginning slowly and working collaboratively with faculty to help develop our intervention initiatives has been the necessary foundational work of “getting to yes” when it comes to growing our initiatives and seeking broader faculty participation.
Outreach Initiatives
Embedded Tutoring. By partnering with faculty to integrate a tutor into the actual course, student engagement is guaranteed. The tutor in the classroom can help facilitate classwork and activities alongside the instructor and provide contextualized tutoring support to individual students who need his or her assistance the most. Additionally, the relationships that develop between the tutor and the students in the classroom frequently translate into additional student visits to our tutoring centers. Faculty report experiencing course success rate increases after implementing embedded tutoring in their classes. The initiative can be implemented easily and is very cost efficient as a single labor hour can impact a dozen or more students within a single class period. By leveraging student workers, the average cost of this intervention is approximately $250 per section per semester, equating to about $10 per student for the entire 15-week term.
Biology Mock Lab. The ASC Outreach program partnered with Biology faculty to host a twice-per-semester optional ‘Mock Lab’ experience. The Mock Lab is a low-stakes, low-stress experience available to all students designed to provide them with exposure to the lab practical environment prior to the actual exams. The initiative began as a pilot effort working with three faculty and has subsequently scaled to full implementation across three campus locations. In recent administrations, the mock lab engaged over 500 students, nearly 70% of college-wide course enrollment. Course success rates among participants have consistently outpaced historic averages. An additional benefit of this initiative is that it occurs within our tutoring centers during normal operating hours, thus requiring zero additional labor expenditure, while introducing students to our other academic support services.
Online Tutoring and MathChat Live. At the request of faculty, the ASC Outreach program developed customized online tutoring support based on the specific contexts of courses including algebra, financial and managerial accounting, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, business modeling and simulation, and Microsoft Office software applications. Utilizing a web-conferencing platform, online sessions are delivered on the same days and times each week consistently throughout the semester. The result has been stable attendance at each session, typically ranging between five and eight students, rising to as many as many as 25 students during exam reviews. Utilizing student workers, a fixed cost of less than $20 per online tutoring session represents an efficient ratio of labor expense to student interaction given the one-to-many paradigm of the sessions. These sessions support over 250 course sections per year.
Outcomes and Impact
Annually
• Student participation with ASC outreach initiatives totaled over 17,000 interactions during the 18-19 Academic year.
• Embedded Tutoring supports over 100 sections annually and has improved individual course success rates by 8% - 30%, engaging over 2,500 students.
• Biology Mock lab has engaged up to 70% of students enrolled in General Biology with course success rates among participants averaging as high as 86%, an improvement of at least 20 points over historic averages, engaging over 1000 students per year.
• Student engagement with academic support services has increased from approximately 15% of enrolled students to over 30% of enrollment.
• Over the three-year implementation period, total annual program costs for academic support decreased by over $68,000 (a net reduction of 12%), while experiencing an increase in total student participation from 29,000 annual interactions to over 51,000 annual interactions (a net increase of 67%).
• Provides employment for nearly 100 student workers.
Historically
• Average semester GPA among student participants of 2.9, a 6% increase over historic averages.
• Course success rate among student participants exceeds 80%, surpassing historic averages by over 5%.
Conclusion
These partnerships contribute to the preservation of faculty intended rigor of their courses while simultaneously providing the support that individual students need to achieve success, improve performance outcomes in strategically identified gateway courses, foster greater course-integration of academic support operations, and leverage existing resources to enhance service availability, quality, and impact, while reducing annual operating costs.