Nobody likes placement tests.  For incoming students, they revive the specter of being evaluated on material they have already forgotten.  For our Summer Connections staff, they become the perpetual reason that students don’t complete the registration process properly.  And for faculty, placement tests seem to miss a growing proportion of students that quickly appear in over their head in class even though the tests “placed” those students in it.

Over the last few weeks, based on questions asked by the math faculty and some very thoughtful conversations and suggestions on their part, we have been taking a hard look at our math placement process.  We compared it with alternative methods of placement and tracked students over each of the last four years to see how they did in the math courses they took.  We’ve found all kinds of interesting tidbits that have spurred some important solutions that I think will help our students in the years to come.  But one piece of data stood out to me that I wanted to share concerning (a) the difference between our incoming students’ perception of college and the way that we would like them to engage it, and (b) the ramifications of that difference.

Before launching into this post, however, I have to give a massive shout out to Kimberly Dyer, the backbone of my office, for her work on this project.  She has done all of the data organizing and analysis.  If I’m being honest, this week I’m just riding the coat tails of greatness.

Although our current math placement protocol is set up to place students across a range of math courses, a large proportion of students end up placing into either pre-calculus or calculus I.  Students with a math placement score of 20 or below are assigned to pre-calculus and students with a 25 or above are assigned to calculus I or higher.  But for the students who score between 21-24, we tell them to consult with advisers and others to determine which math course – pre-calculus or calculus I – is the best fit for them.

All else being equal, I think it’s safe to say that on average we would expect students who earn a 21 or a 22 to enroll more often in pre-calculus and students who earn a 23 or 24 would enroll more often in calculus I.  Unfortunately . . . .

As you can see in the table above, for all of the placement scores in this ‘tweener group, more students chose to enroll in calculus I than in pre-calculus.  Yet, maybe it’s not a problem because all of these students are able to handle calculus I.  The table below shows the subsequent grades for students at each placement score who chose to take calculus instead of pre-calculus.

Apparently, students who earn scores that would cause most of us to think twice before registering for calculus I are more often taking calculus I anyway.  And the failure rates lay out in pretty stark terms the consequences of that decision.  Clearly, there must be other issues at play that would convince an incoming freshman to choose the more advanced math course when their placement score suggests some caution in considering the more advanced course.

The folks who help with registration at Summer Connection often describe the pressures that students and their parents bring to this issue.  Many students are worried about graduating in four years and therefore want to take the highest level of courses they can take.  Others think that because they took pre-calculus in high school, they should automatically take calculus I – regardless of their assessed degree of preparation as measured by the placement test.  Moreover, some may not want to face that fact that although they may have passed pre-calculus in high school, they didn’t learn as much as they would like to think.

In my mind, this disconnect exemplifies the degree to which incoming students and families don’t grasp the difference between going to college to acquire content knowledge and going to college to develop skills and dispositions.  In their mind, content acquisition is isolated to a given course.  Content learned or not learned in one course is not likely to affect the ability to learn content in another course.  However, we know that content is continually changing, and in today’s world it is practically ubiquitous.  While it is necessary, it is not sufficient, and is only a part of our ultimate educational goal.  For us, content is the mechanism by, or the context within which, we develop skills and dispositions.  Then the content helps us re-situate those skills and dispositions in settings akin to the environments in which students will be expected to excel after college.

This misunderstanding of the point of college – and more specifically the educational outcomes we intend for students who attend Augustana – has major implications for students.  For these kids who perceive college to be about content acquisition, they see it as a sort of intellectual pie eating contest, where it makes complete sense to bite off more than you can chew to get what you can and gobble your way to the finish line regardless of whether or not you happen to throw up along the way or stir up an indigestional nightmare at the end.  On the contrary, if students understand that college is about developing skills and dispositions, I think that they might be more likely to appreciate the chance to start at the beginning that is appropriate for them, savoring each experience like a slow cooked, seven course meal because they know that the culmination of college is made exponentially better by the particular ordering and integrating of the flavors that have come before.

Although we definitely need to emphasize this message from the moment of students’ first interaction with Augustana, convincing students AND their parents to understand and embrace this conceptual turn is not the sole responsibility of admissions or Summer Connections or even LSFY.  For students to grasp the implications of this shift, they need to hear it from all of us repeatedly.  Otherwise, there are too many external pressures that will influence students to engage in academic behaviors that will ultimately harm their development.  We may well need to eliminate the ‘tweener category of math placement scores, but this is not the only situation where that monster raises its ugly head.  However, if we are vigilant, I think we will help many more students deliberately and intentionally suck the marrow out of their four years at Augustana instead of treating like an eating contest.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Last week I wrote about the way that our seniors’ responses to the question “Who recommended the Community Engagement Center to you?” might reflect the values that we communicate through out actions even if they aren’t necessarily the values that we believe we have embraced.  At the end of my post I promised to dig deeper into our senior survey to better understand the students who said that no one recommended the Community Engagement Center to them.  During the past several days my students and I have been peeling the data back in all kinds of ways.  Based on prior findings on students’ experiences with major advising and its connection to post-graduate planning, we thought that we might be able to identify some pattern in the data that would give us some big answers.  So we laid out a couple of hypotheses to test for the students who said no one recommended the CEC to them.  We thought:

• These students would be more likely to intend to go to graduate school
• These students would be more likely to major in a humanities discipline
• These students would be less involved in co-curricular activities
• These students would be generally less engaged in their college experience

Here is what we found.

First, these students weren’t more likely to be headed to graduate school.  This hypothesis was based on an earlier finding that students who intended to go to grad school were more likely to work with a professor to guide them through the application process while students planning to get a full time job would be referred to Career Services.  But our  students were distributed across the post-graduate plan options of grad school and work just like everyone else.  So this first hypothesis was a total bust.

Genius IR Shop : 0  –  Data : 1

Second, these students were not significantly more likely to major in humanities disciplines.  This hypothesis evolved from some earlier conversations with students that suggested less of a natural connection between the career center and the more “pure” liberal arts disciplines.  In the end, while some of the humanities disciplines did seem to appear slightly more often than most pre-professional degrees, there were plenty of students from the natural and physical sciences who also said no one recommended the CEC to them.  So even though there was an initial glimmer of possibility, the reality is that this second hypothesis was also a flop.

(Aspiring to be but clearly not yet) Genius IR Shop : 0  –  Data : 2

Third, we couldn’t find much in our data to support our assertion that these students were less involved in co-curricular activities.  Our originating hypothesis was based on the idea that students who are less social might not end up in situations where the CEC would be recommended as often.  Although these students found slightly fewer student groups that matched their interests, they were still involved in at least one student organizations and clubs as often as other students.  Despite looking at this data through the most friendly lens, we just couldn’t say that this group of students’ responses was a function of their lack of co-curricular involvement.

(Nothing but a bumbling shadow of a) Genius IR Shop : 0  –  Data : 3

At this point in the story, you ought to suspect some stress on my part.  It’s not all that much fun to be wrong repeatedly.  Furthermore, our last hypothesis about a general passivity is qualitatively more difficult to test than simply looking at differences across one particular question.  Nonetheless, my minions and I soldiered on.  We looked across all of the questions on the senior survey, identifying significant differences and looking for trends.  Thankfully, we found a host of evidence to support our last hunch.

We found that the students who said no one recommended the CEC to them were less plugged in to their college experience across the board.  Their responses to every one of the advising questions were significantly lower, their responses to many of the co-curricular experiences questions were significantly lower, and their responses to a number of curricular experience questions both in the major and across the curriculum were significantly lower.

(Salvaging the crumbling remains of my) Genius IR Shop : 1  –  Data : 3

What jumps out to me as a result of this exercise is the importance of our informal educational efforts.  There will always be a subset of students who simply, magically do the things we hope they would do, take the initiative to ask the next question, and get themselves ahead of the curve simply because they are the cream of our crop.  However, there will always be a subset of students who stumble out of the gate, drift passively into the fog, and avoid choices simply because they are . . . human.  Because we have many cream of the crop types, its all too easy to miss those who suffer from being, well, normal.  So to me, this is why we must take the initiative to ask students if they’ve done the things that might seem completely obvious to us, like recommending to them that they should check out the services at the CEC early in their college career – and tell them exactly why this can matter in the broader scheme of their life’s journey.  If we want all of our students – no matter if they are already perfectly formed adults or if they are bumbling, stumbling, grumbling prepubescents masquerading as undergraduates on the cusp of adulthood – to wring every developmental drop out of their college learning experience, then we have to take on a proactive role to ensure that no one gets left out in the cold, especially those who are more susceptible to float off with the current du jour.

Remember, this study isn’t about who did and did not use the CEC.  The question we examined asks “who recommended the CEC to you.”  We asked the question this way specifically to give us feedback on the nature of the experience we are delivering to our students – not just to find out what our students did.  And as it turns out, the degree to which we are proactive educators may be one of the most crucial ways in which we might purposefully guide our more passive students.  Not rocket science?  Maybe.  Worth remembering as we bustle through our own madcap world?  Absolutely.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Sometime I worry that I tend to look at our student data through an overly quantitative lens.  I’ll look for significant predictors of specific outcomes or statistically significant differences between two groups.  And as trained, I instinctively take the steps necessary to avoid the most common statistical stumbling blocks such as claiming significant when there is none or mistaking correlation for causation.  But there are times when this propensity to immediately dive deep into the data means that I miss a critical point that sits in plain view, screaming at the big nosed, bearded face looming over it, “Hey, you idiot!  I’m right here!”

One such moment came recently while I was revisiting the simple distribution of seniors’ responses to the question, “Who recommended the CEC (Community Engagement Center) to you?”  Student could select as many options as might apply in their case: faculty within my major(s), faculty outside my major(s), my major adviser, my first year adviser, residential life staff, student activities staff, my parents, another student, other administrators, and finally, no one recommended the CEC to me.

As I stared at the percentages under each response option, I began to think that this question might be the type that holds within it an array of discoveries.  First, the distribution of responses appeared to reflect a set of values that we communicate to students about 1) the role of the CEC on campus and, 2)  the way in which we see our educational efforts as a process of preparing students for life after Augustana.  Second, since the CEC often functions as a student gateway to all sorts of other important educational experiences, I began to wonder if students who indicate that no one recommended the CEC to them might also score lower on a host of other experiences that either might follow from an initial interaction with the CEC or might suggest a broader degree of disengagement.

So here is the question followed by the distribution of students’ responses:

Who recommended the CEC (Community Engagement Center) to you? Check as many as might apply.

• Faculty within my major(s) – 41.5%
• My major adviser – 28.1%
• No one recommended the CEC to me – 23.4%
• Another student – 21.4%
• Faculty outside my major(s) – 17%
• Other administrator – 14%
• My first year adviser – 11.4%
• My parents – 9.6%
• Student Activities staff – 5.2%
• Residential Life staff – 1.6%

These numbers alone tell us something pretty interesting.  Clearly, recommendations to the CEC tend to come out of students’ academic experience in their major.  First, this suggests that these recommendations probably come later in one’s college career – junior or senior year (sophomore year at the earliest).  Further, these recommendations rarely come from the co-curricular side of the student experience.  Thus, it appears that in general we conceive of the role of the CEC as either, a) a means of resolving an absence of post-graduate career purpose (students in their later years who still don’t seem to know what they want to do after college or students who in the midst of searching for a career plan “B”), or, b) a support service to help students bundle the totality of their college experience in preparation for the job or grad school search.  Either way, the role we see for the CEC seems more retroactive than proactive. It doesn’t appear that we have generally thought of the CEC as a students’ compass with which they might plot out  - from the moment they arrive on campus – their college experience in a way that allows them to move forward with intentionality.  Nor do we appear to have thought much about linking our students’ co-curricular experiences – one of Augustana’s true, albeit often under-appreciated strengths – with the role of the CEC.  All of this doesn’t seem to comport with our belief that a liberal arts college experience is holistic, developmental, and fully integrated; one that starts, from the very beginning, with the end in mind, and one that believes the whole must be greater than the sum of the parts.

Now there may be lots of lengthy explanations for this particular distribution of responses; some of them might even be entirely legitimate.  But it doesn’t change the nature of the values that we appear to be expressing – or not expressing – as portrayed through student-reported experiences.  In addition, 23.4% of our seniors indicated that no one recommended them to the CEC.  Given the array of services that originate out of the CEC, I’d suggest that we would like that number to be much lower than effectively one-quarter of a graduating class.

Admittedly, there were some interesting anomalies in the data and caveats that we should consider.  A few students indicated that no one recommended the CEC to them AND indicated that another student recommended the CEC to them.  And it was during this cohort of students’ career at Augustana that the CVR (Center for Vocational Reflection) merged with a variety of other services including Career Services to create the CEC – making it possible that some students might not have considered their earlier recommendations to the CVR when responding to this question.  But even in the presence of these caveats, we should be willing to ask ourselves whether our students’ experience mirrors the values that we purport to hold.

The other aspect of this particular question that I find interesting is the degree to which the difference in responses to this question (no one recommended the CEC to me vs. someone recommended the CEC to me) might mask statistically significant differences on many other questions in the senior survey.  Now I’m not claiming that there is a direct relationship between this question and all of the others on which student responses also differed.  However, it seems to me highly possible that, like many other situations in life where one unique opportunity correlates with or begets a series of other opportunities that ultimately separates a person from the pack, interaction with the CEC may indeed open up pathways and ways of thinking about the college experience in the same way that color changes the fundamental nature of black and white film.

It turns out that students who said no one recommended the CEC to them differed significantly (in a statistical sense) on many items on the senior survey that involve the advising experience, the broader curricular experience, and the co-curricular experience.  Next week I’ll talk more about what we might learn from this array of differences.

Make it a good day,

Mark

Higher ed folks often toss around numbers that supposedly describe the quality of a given college or university.  But a funny thing happens on the road to an “average” score.  Although it might approximate everyone, it rarely describes anyone in particular.  So unless a college hires an Institutional Psychic to predict the individual path of each new student (The Nostradamus Endowed Chair of Student Success?), metrics like an average retention rate or a student-faculty ratio don’t tell us as much about a place as we might like – or want – to think.

But this doesn’t mean that the data is useless.  In fact, we can learn a lot about ourselves by looking for differences between subsets of students on a variety of such metrics.  For example, an overall retention rate could – and often does – mask stark differences in persistence between high and lower ability students, high and lower income students, or men and women.  Identifying the nature of those differences could point us toward the solutions that would help us improve what we do.

Over the last several years we’ve increasingly employed this approach to squeeze more useful information out of our student experience data.  Many of you have already seen the way that the experiences of your majors might differ from other Augustana students in your senior survey departmental reports.  Taking the same approach that we use to better understand student retention (dividing students by gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and academic preparation/incoming ACT score) reveals a layer of nuance that I believe deepens our understanding of the Augustana experience across diverse students types.  It also helps us use evidence to think about how we might engage specific types of students in specific moments to more carefully mitigate these differences.

As an aside, the differences that we spend most time considering are those that cross a threshold of statistical significance – meaning that there is less than a 5% chance that the likelihood of the observed difference is coincidental (the formula that we used is called a t-test).  In this post I am going to focus on differences between low income and middle/upper income students.  Future posts will consider the differences the emerge across a range of variables including gender, race/ethnicity, and academic preparation.

Comparing low income students with middle/upper income students presents a great example of the complexities this kind of analysis can provide.  We used Pell Grant eligibility as the marker of lower income – its an easy way to categorize financial need, even as it probably over-simplifies the impact of socioeconomic status (SES).  As you look through the items on which differences emerged, think about the possible factors that might produce a statistically significance difference between the two groups’ responses.

Lower income students scored higher than middle/upper income students on several items.

• My co-curricular activities provided numerous opportunities to interact with students who differed from me in race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, or social/political values.
• My out-of-class experiences have helped me connect what I learned in the classroom with real life events
• In your non-major courses, about how often were you asked to put together ideas or concepts from different courses when completing assignments and during class discussions?
• My interactions with the librarians helped me improve my approach to researching a topic.
• Augustana faculty and staff welcomed student input on institutional policy and handbook decisions.
• When you had questions or concerns about financial issues, were the offices you contacted responsive and helpful?

Conversely, lower income students scored lower than middle/upper income students on one item.

• My out-of-class experiences have helped me develop a deeper understanding of myself.

The scope of these differences is fascinating.  In some instances low income students’ responses seem comparatively more positive than the rest of the student body.  While this might suggest that some of our efforts are indeed providing a compensatory impact, I think these findings highlight the relative lack of pre-college opportunity that lower income students often must overcome (fewer communal resources like libraries or access to technology, less exposure to some of the ideas fundamental to the liberal arts, etc.).  In other cases, these findings might be evidence of the quality of our effort to be sensitive and inclusive to these students (e.g., the relatively more positive interactions for low income students when asking for help with financial issues).  Understanding the nature of these differences could play an important role in shaping our daily interactions with students who may, unbeknownst to us, come from a lower socioeconomic background.

At the same time, sometimes these differences in responses suggest that some of these students’ experiences are less positive.  Given the small numbers of lower income students at Augustana, it seems likely that they would recognize the extent to which they interact across socioeconomic difference more often than middle/upper income students.  In some cases this might contribute to a sense of marginalization for low income students.  Finally, the difference in responses on the question about “out-of-class experiences develop a deeper understanding of myself” is particularly intriguing.  I’d like to know more about the underlying factors that might influence that difference.

Taken together, these findings replicate the results of many recent studies regarding the impact of social class on college students – an impact that extends far beyond financial constraints.  What have you observed in your interactions with low income students?  Are there things you have done that seem to help these students succeed at Augustana?  As you interact with students this week, I hope these findings expand your sense of the ways in which our students experience Augustana differently, and how our sensitivity to these differences can improve our educational impact.

Make it a good day,

Mark