Academic Support Module

Purpose:

The purpose of this MTN module is to coordinate and fully integrate support services proven to advance student’s academic and personal success, as well as develop comprehensive systems and approaches that enable the campus to anticipate and effectively intervene when students experience academic and personal struggles that threaten their ability to persist.

Priorities:

Enhance academic support, tools, and success resources.

Credo and the MTN Academic Success team identified existing services at OWU as abundant, high-performing, and under-used. This module seeks to enhance existing programs, tools, and resources to support the CM and at risk students.

Progress:

After a full examination of available data and written material the team members began a process of site visits to discuss challenges, experiences, and observations by the people who administer and work in those offices. Quantitative data were also examined, if they were available. The team members are in the process of completing these visits and returning to academic support offices to discuss our findings and work with the offices to develop recommendations.  

Increase campus wide understanding and recognition of the Critical Middle. How can we 1. Support, 2. Connect, and 3. Ensure that the CM succeeds.

The Critical Middle (CM) are students who have a GPA between 2.5 and 3.23. This group of students generally do not receive the specialized attention of those at risk of failing or those who are considered high academic achievers. This is the largest group of our students.

Critical middle students are the most likely to leave OWU. They are retained at 8-11% percentage points below the mean of the retention rate of the total OWU student populations. Increasing the retention rate of the CM would dramatically improve the overall retention rate at OWU. Even so, we have little in the way of accessible data about the CM students. OWU does not organize data in a way that it is easy to access and develop a better understanding of OWU’s CM.

Based on the Credo Roadmap Milestone #1 (Roadmap, p13) we seek to (1) better understand the critical middle population, (2) develop a better understanding of the student experience with the existing academic support services, and (3) develop a portal of engagement with this population. This portal would allow us to both run a pilot study with the CM students and provide a control group of students who might not choose to participate in a pilot program so that we can assess pilot programs in real time.

Central questions:

  1. How do the students in the critical middle (GPAs from 2.25 – 3.25) understand, experience, and use the support options available to them at OWU?
  2. How does this same group of students develop a connection to OWU and incorporate being a OWU student as part of their identity?

Progress:

The team has conducted a full review of data that are accessible and discussions with people in the university who administer those data. These data are not organized in a way that is accessible. We will write a recommendation that a data dashboard be created for data about engagement of students of any grad point.

We are conducting interviews with 20 CM students about their engagement with OWU organizations of all types.

 We are considering creating an engagement pod type of program (yet to be named) related to the OWU Connection. (To be discussed after the Connection Conference.)

Increase utilization of academic support and success departments

 Based on the progress from the previous two priorities, this module seeks to increase the utilization of programs, tools, and resources by all students faculty, and staff.

Guiding questions are: How can we increase use and engagement of the existing services? How can we tailor the services to the needs of the students? Are there services that are needed but not offered? How can we help faculty and staff to better understand the services that are available? How can we help faculty refer students to services?

Progress:

We have collected lists of confusing language about services on campus. For example, Sagan ARC is regularly referred to in four different ways that can sound like and entirely different office. Another example, there is confusion among students about what “office hours” means. We are in discussion about methods to standardize language.

The work in the previous priorities will direct our work in this area.