Colleges and universities can use data to make decisions that are truly transformative for students.
Higher education institutions have the ability to leverage data to help improve course completion and boost student outcomes, according to Dr. Michael Moore, Research Scientist from the University of New Hampshire and Dr. Brad Piazza, Vice President of Learning at Waukesha County Technical College (WCTC). Dr. Moore and Dr. Piazza outlined their thoughts during a session at REMOTE: The Connected Faculty Summit hosted by Arizona State University.
Piazza explained that WCTC, one of 16 technical colleges in the state of Wisconsin, uses data to make decisions and transform education to meet the needs of its specific student body. About 85 percent of the school’s students are part-time, with an average age of 26, and about 20 percent of students fall into a racial/ethnic minority group.
In the fall of 2000, the school make a great shift to run most courses and programs in eight-week terms that now provides five entry points for students. “We relied on data to make this decision,” Piazza pointed out. “Data helped us demonstrate the need to do something differently.”
“Traditionally, higher ed has asked, ‘Is the student ready for college?’ but that’s backwards. It’s really, ‘is the college ready for the student?’ he noted. “This is the first question we asked ourselves.”
We had to also ask ourselves if there a way as an institution, in the way that we’re set up and that we’re delivering courses that we can move the needle on the number of credits the student takes, so we can get our students through our courses in a more efficient manner, Piazza explained.
The school looked at completion rates for third- and fourth-year students, for all students and particularly African American students. It also looked at a variety of qualitative and quantitative data, gathering information in a post-graduate survey that queried students about what the school could have done to increase their overall satisfaction. Some of the most common topics and themes that came out of the survey included schedule flexibility and graduate on time, which indicates that it was taking students too long to earn their degree.
“The most compelling part for me is that we were already running eight-week courses throughout the college, but not in any kind of deliberate way,” Piazza said. “We looked at the course success and withdrawal rates for students in 16-week courses and eight-week courses in the spring of 2019. We found that 82.6 percent of students completed the 16-week courses, while 91 percent and 92.7 percent completed two eight-week courses in the same time period.” The withdrawal rate was 9.5 percent for the 16-week courses and only 3.7 percent and 3.1 percent for the two eight-week courses.
“Time is the enemy of completion in two-year colleges,” Piazza said. “There’s a lot that can happen in students with an average age of 26 over the course of 16 weeks, and the longer it takes you to finish a class, the likelier you are to not complete it.”
Students are telling us what they need, and it was time for us to start listening, Piazza said. “They’re telling us what they need with their course completion rates and their withdrawal rates. This wasn’t a learning and student service lift; this changed everything across all business operations and across everything at the college. In order to do that, you need to innovate and do true transformative change.”
The first-year data is impressive. 1.6 percent increase in course enrollment, a slight increase in number of credits for students. Course success and course withdrawals were slightly up, an increase attributable to the shift to remote learning during COVID.
Michael Moore at the University of New Hampshire worked with WCTC in his research studying the impact of inclusive access programs on student outcomes. The purpose of the study was to examine the use of an inclusive access course at WCTC. He looked at six courses – college mathematics, fundamentals of mathematics, macroeconomics, math with business applications, medical terminology and introduction to software applications. The study population is 7110 students, with 5770 students receiving letter grades.
The study found a five percent increase in letter grade A. Success rates improved for males and females across age levels. “The race and ethnicity data is particularly interesting,” Moore notes. “White males showed a 1.6 percent increase in a letter C grade or better. Other groups showed a 2.93 percent increase in grades. But the biggest takeaway from this study is an increase of nearly 13 percent of letter grades of C or better for African American males.”
“When we look at inclusive access in the results from this study, while we can't generalize it across all. technical colleges or all two-year institutions, the results say that if we're using this program, there's likely to be an increase in success rate,” Moore explained. “This means it's a huge impact on first semester GPA and we know, from research how important first-semester GPA is on student retention and persistence.”
For more articles from the REMOTE Summit, see:
Strategies to Support Online Adjunct Faculty
Essential Ways to Promote Student Success in Higher Education
Green Skills: Preparing Learners for the Green Economy
Urban Serving Universities are Disrupting Structures for 21st Century Skills
The Metaversity: Leveraging a Shared Learning Platform
Faculty Needs to Be Drivers of Institutional Change
Lessons Learned: 8 Strategies for Effective Instruction
Supporting Experimental Pedagogy with Social Animation Tools