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By: UPIKE Public Relations | October 1, 2019
The Center for Student Success at the University of Pikeville strives to provide each student with connections to the campus community, solutions for common issues that arise for first-year students, and guidance for academic and personal success. In alignment with the center’s goals, UPIKE Director of Center for Student Success Megan Childress and Director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness Meg Wright Sidle investigated ways to best support academically at-risk students. They authored an article titled Using Students’ Narratives and the College Student Inventory as an Early Alert Tool for Student Success, which was recently published in Academic Advising Today, an electronic publication distributed quarterly by the National Academic Advising Association (NACADA) to more than 14,000 members around the world.
Childress and Sidle noted that UPIKE traditionally utilized the College Student InventoryTM (CSI) to help advisors know more about the new students and realized that they might be able to use this same data to predict students who may be at risk. Advisors could intervene early enough to retain the students and help them be successful at the university. CSI indicators included such areas as study habits, family emotional support, dropout proneness, educational stress, predicted academic difficulty and high school grades.
Initially, Childress and Sidle utilized the predicted academic difficulty area to identify the students but they knew that more could be done to help retain students who were struggling. They decided to identify commonalities in students who left UPIKE and learned that lack of family support was also a major factor. A system was implemented to alert student success advisors as soon as students completed the CSI.
Advisors acted proactively to connect with and mentor the students through various forms of communication. Initiative was taken to ensure the students were referred to the appropriate campus resources at the right time, make them aware of important dates on the academic calendar and answer questions among other key activities.
As a result, student retention from first to second year has increased by 11.3% over five years.
“Navigating college can be difficult for even the most well-prepared student, but especially so for students who don’t feel academically prepared and need additional support,” explained Childress. “Collaborating with Institutional Research to identify those students early in their academic careers has put my team in a better position to be proactive about student success.”
UPIKE faculty and staff often work in partnership to best support students.
“It’s important that different offices work together to put student success first,” Sidle said. “I was in hopes that since we are already asking students for this data, we could use it for more than just advising.”
Dean of Student Success Mathys Meyer, Ph.D., added, “I believe strongly that our UPIKE staff are professionals dedicated to student success. This is just another instance that supports the power of collaboration to reach that goal.”
Click here to read the full published article.
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