Achieving the Dream Newsletter Focusing on Student Success

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1 Community College of Allegheny County Achieving the Dream Newsletter Focusing on Student Success October 2012 Volume V, Number 3 AFT Supports Faculty Engagement The AFT executive board has allocated a portion of AFT travel money to support employees involved in state-wide and national initiatives that benefit all departments/disciplines/campuses. The funds will support CCAC faculty attendance at three upcoming events: State-wide Assessment/Placement Steering Committee hosted by the PA Commission for Community Colleges Student Success Forum hosted by the PA Commission for Community Colleges The Democracy Commitment annual conference This generous offer ensures that CCAC faculty will be part of the student success conversation at both the state and national levels. In this issue: Achieving the Dream AFT Supports Faculty Engagement CCAC Awarded Title III Grant Math Cafés Update A Data-Driven Decision Early Intervention Progress Report Assessment CAT Best Practices CCAC Awarded Title III Grant The Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is one of just 14 colleges and universities across the nation selected to receive the Title III: Strengthening Institutions grant from the US Department of Education. CCAC s five-year $1.59 million award will enable the college to expand its capacity to serve low-income students by providing funds to improve and strengthen academic quality, instructional management and fiscal stability in order to help students complete their educations. CCAC will use the funding to provide Learning Commons, which will incorporate learner-centered engagement spaces, tutoring, faculty interaction and facilitated computer-assisted learning at each of the college s four campuses. While the initiative focuses on improving the skills and abilities of CCAC s developmental students in English and reading courses, all CCAC students will have access to the Learning Commons. This award follows on recently announced funding from The Heinz Endowments to support the enhancement of math education at the college, including Math Cafés. With the 1

2 announcement of the new Title III grant, CCAC plans to integrate the Learning Commons with the Math Cafés. Math Cafés Update Alycia Bencloski-Brashear, Project Coordinator, Math Cafés The Math Cafés have had an exciting month. There are eleven facilitators working at six college locations. Involvement of faculty has been extremely exciting. We have four faculty liaisons working to promote Math Café events with faculty and students. It is working! The number of visits has been steadily climbing. Since September 17 th, there have been over 1,400 visits to the Math Cafés by 537 unique students. As of October 13 th, 40% of students using the Math Cafés are taking a developmental math class, and 27% are enrolled in MAT 108. MAT 120 2% Math Café by Course Number 537 unique students 10/13/2012 Higher Level 15% MAT 106 2% MAT 165 4% MAT % MAT % MAT % Other Subjects 10% There are even more exciting developments in the works. Math Café Open Houses are being held at each of the four campuses in October and November. Peer tutors are also being hired to work during peak hours at each location. We re creating workshops to cover popular topics such as fractions, factoring, math study skills, placement test preparation and more! Food and fun did not stop students from studying math! [Photo: Allegheny Campus Math Café Open House: October 18, 2012] 2

3 A Data-Driven Decision By Allysen Todd, PhD, Dean of Academic Affairs, Allegheny Campus, and Math Coordinating Dean The full-time mathematics faculty college-wide recommended to Dr. Johnson in August 2012 to eliminate the Math Enrichment course as an alternative for students who are low scorers on the math portion of the Compass placement test. In doing so, they also recommended to the President that a specially designated section of MAT080 should be offered to those same students. Dr. Johnson accepted those recommendations in early September. The math faculty based this decision on data they received from the IR department which tracked low scoring math students over a two-year period as they took the non-credit math enrichment course. Overall, there was no significant difference between those students who took the course and then moved through the math course sequence and those who did not. Academic deans and math department heads collaborated to create the enhanced sections of MAT080 for the 13SP semester. These enhanced sections have a recitation or lab session added to the scheduled time for the courses which is to be spent in the campus Math Café. Within the section nomenclature, an M has been inserted to distinguish these sections from the traditional sections of MAT080. Thus, for example, a South Campus section is listed as MAT080-SCM1. It is very important that students registered in enhanced sections of MAT080 make use of the services in the Math Café. Attendance there is factored into the student s final grade. The IT department has been asked to incorporate capabilities of Datatel/Colleague and Appointment Central so that when students log in with their student ID# before entering the Math Café, they also select the math course and section in which they are enrolled. This way, faculty teaching those sections will receive an notifying them of the student s usage. Research data has shown that the more students work with math, the better they perform in math courses. It is hoped that with faculty encouraging students to use the Math Café, with facilitators helping students with math in a relaxed and comfortable setting, and with more time-on-task for students on math, academic progress will be realized. Data collected from this new alternative will be analyzed in another two years. Early Intervention Progress Report By Norm Downey, Perkins Grant Director Since the Fall of 2008 through Achieving the Dream, the Online Early Intervention (EI) System has been available to all instructors to refer any student who is struggling academically in the first one-third of the semester for assistance from the college s student services staff. Many changes have taken place since the system was first introduced, most notably the implementation of a unified data collection and reporting systems built by our ITS staff in fall 2010 that allows us to better measure EI s efficacy. What has not changed are our four goals for Early Intervention: 1) To reach as many struggling students as early in the term as possible, 2) To connect struggling students to college resources to resolve their academic issues, 3

4 3) To help students maintain or improve their GPA by passing the courses from which they are referred, and 4) To improve student retention rates. The systems built by ITS allow staff to send feedback from Datatel to the referring faculty member and allows the College to track the results. By improving EI s data flows, we have been able to increase the overall success of the Early Intervention System. Comparing the fall-to-fall and spring-to-spring numbers, we can see an increase in the number of Early Intervention referrals, the unique students referred and the courses/sections referring students. Note that after the first full year of adoption of the enhanced data collection system, we see a dramatic increase in the number of referrals with staff-to-student interactions. This increase led directly to an improvement in the number of students receiving passing grades in the referring courses. The final row of the table shows the number of students who passed the referring course with an A, B or C grade, and is limited to those referrals where we have documented staff/student interactions. The data in Table 1 shows that we are accomplishing our first three goals for Early Intervention. Statistic Term Spring 2012 Fall Year Totals Spring Fall 2010 Year Totals Yearly Difference Total Referrals Unique Students Referred Course/Sections referring students Referrals with Staff Interactions # with A, B or C Final Grade * Table 1 A student can be referred from more than one class this is an unduplicated count * For Academic Challenges Referrals with staff interaction The fourth goal of Early Intervention is an improvement in student retention rates. Table 2 shows a comparison of the retention rates for students referred for EI versus the overall college retention rates. The data indicate that students referred for EI have retention rates that are on average 10% greater than the rest of the student population. Therefore the fourth goal of Early Intervention is also being met. Statistic Terms Fall to Spring 2012 Fall 2010 to Spring Students referred for EI 76.8% 77.2% College Retention Rate 66.3% 67.7% Difference 10.5% 9.5% Table 2 Much work still needs to be done to make our Online Early Intervention System a model of national excellence, but the results over the past four terms are encouraging. 4

5 CAT Best Practices The ATD newsletter periodically features a CAT Summary to highlight the best practices in classroom assessment at CCAC. (The Muddiest Point is one of the most popular classroom assessment techniques. This CAT summary is a good example of collecting useful data and putting it to good use. It is also evidence that assessments do not need to be difficult nor time consuming.) Faculty Name: Katie Lang Campus: Boyce Campus Date: 9/18/12 Discipline/Program: English Course: ENG 089 Topic: Parts of Speech Classroom Assessment Technique (CAT) used: Angelo and Cross The Muddiest Point Summary of Student Feedback: Overall, students indicated that, contrary to my belief, prepositions were the most unclear part of speech at the conclusion of class. A few students also expressed that they were able to easily comprehend most of the material as a result of my PowerPoint and whiteboard presentations. About half of the students remarked that their delay in comprehending the material was a result of a lack of exposure to such grammatical concepts over the course of several years. How Were the Results Used to Improve Student Learning? I used the results to create a mini-lesson on prepositions as an introduction to the next lesson on subjects and verbs. I discussed prepositions within the context of the other parts of speech (students prior knowledge) and related prepositions to the new lesson in order to foster new connections for learning Please consider completing a CAT Summary Form for one of your classroom assessments and submit it to aslcommittee@ccac.edu. Information about CATs and using assessment in your teaching portfolio is available on the assessment of student learning webpage. Newsletter prepared by, Mary Kate Quinlan Director of Learning Outcomes and Achieving the Dream mquinlan@ccac.edu 5