As a presenter at EducationDynamics’ inaugural National Dialog on Student Retention Conference, Dr. Ralph Rascati, Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of University College, Professor of Biology at Kennesaw State University, shared with attendees the efforts Kennesaw State University has made toward improving retention during the critical freshman year in a presentation titled Academic Affairs and Student Affairs: Collaborative Strategies to Put Attrition in Reverse. To download a copy of this and other conference presentations, go to: http://www.educationdynamics.com/retention_conference/conference_downloads.htm.
In the following interview, Dr. Rascati shares further insights into the institution’s efforts to combat student attrition, many of which have resulted in increased retention as well as improved student performance.
Why are collaborative efforts a key to retention?
One major focus of efforts to retain students is to have them become connected to the institution to ensure that they have a good experience. That experience entails good academic experiences as well as social, campus and community service activities, good customer service from the campus in terms of the academic support services they need and support services in other areas such as financial aid. The best way to do that is to make sure that both Academic Affairs and Student Affairs, or what we call here at Kennesaw our Division of Student Success, are working together to achieve some of these things.
What are some efforts that seem to be working at Kennesaw State?
A prime initiative that we use is an “early alert, early intervention” system, where we’re trying to identify students who are having some difficulty at an early stage. That difficulty might be academic, but on the other hand, difficulties can pertain to other issues as well. Maybe the student is having financial issues that are distracting them from doing well. Or, they may be letting their social life get out of hand, so they’re not coming to class as much as they should or they are not as prepared as they should be.
Students could be developing other types of problems, particularly students who have moved away from home and might be having issues stemming from being homesick, and it could be that those types of issues interfere with their ability to do their best work or to connect with the institution.
Basically, the idea is to have the instructor in the course, to the extent that they can, try to identify what the students’ problems might be. We give them a checklist of things they can look for, and in turn, they notify the Director of First-Year Retention Initiatives. That person would either call the student or send a postcard, and in some way refer them to the appropriate office, which might well be an office within the Division of Student Success—Counseling, Career Services Center and the like. Or, if it’s academic advising they need, the Director of First-Year Retention Initiatives might refer the troubled student to CAPS (Counseling and Advising Program Services), our advising center. They could also be referred to our academic support services, where anything from writing to math can be addressed.
The end goal is to refer them to some service on campus that might be able to help them. That’s where the collaborative nature of the program comes in, to make sure we have the right offices available and that they’re willing to cooperate with us to help these students that have been identified as needing help.
How can schools be more proactive in these identification efforts?
We take a proactive approach by looking at the student’s history. We look at their history of failures in other courses; we look at their history of withdrawals—if they’ve had a pattern of withdrawals from courses. We look at their high school GPA, we look at their SAT scores, basically any factor that might indicate students who might potentially head for some sort of academic difficulty. We try to be proactive with those students and make them aware of the services that are available should they wish to take advantage of them.
What are some other ways Kennesaw State is being proactive in reaching out to students?
One of the units on campus is called the Center for Student Leadership (CSL). That unit reports jointly to me as Dean of University College and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and our Vice President for Student Success, so it has a foot basically in both the academic affairs side and the student success side of the house in terms of its reporting structure and in terms of the activities it does.
One of the CSL’s primary activities is a three year non-credit program called Leaders in Kennesaw (LINK) which is designed to promote leadership through student engagement. In the second year of the program, we ask some of the students to become peer leaders. The peer leaders are assigned to our first-year experience seminar course, and they work very closely with the instructors to help facilitate discussions in the course. Common activities in these programs are student journals or ice-breaking exercises. Facebook accounts are often created for the course, the idea being to get each of the students into that Facebook group and use that as a way of social networking with the students in the class and providing additional information to them.
Sometimes, first-year students will seek out information from other students first, before they’ll consider reaching out to faculty. Students sometimes feel intimidated by the faculty, or they’re just not comfortable approaching them, whereas they might feel more comfortable going to another student for advice or counsel. At Kennesaw, we rely heavily on these peer leaders from the CSL to interact with the faculty and the students.
What is the most important contributing factor to student success?
Besides fostering engagement and connection with an institution, advising is key. When I took the position as Dean of University College two years ago, one of the things I did was immediately create advising teams for our first-year experience seminar course. I’ve long been convinced that one of the big keys to student success is good advising, and making sure students understand what the requirements are and what they need to do so they’re not wasting their time taking courses they don’t need to take or are somehow not getting good advice. I felt like there are different perspectives that can be provided to them, so we created this concept of advising teams that included the faculty instructor in the course, a professional advisor out of our advising center and a student peer advisor from the Center for Student Leadership. Those three parties would act as a team to provide different perspectives to students in regards to their advising. We ran a pilot program in fall of 2006 and it yielded a positive difference in retention, GPA and, for those students who had not declared a major, in the declaration of majors by the end of the first year. All of those factors were positively affected by the presence of the advising teams, assuming the students took advantage of those teams and actually met with them.
We expanded the study in fall 2007 and although we don’t have complete data, we won’t have that until fall 2008 when we see the one-year retention rate, we did look at the fall-to-spring retention. And again we’re seeing a difference between students who were advised as a result of the advising teams and students who were not.
How can learning communities help foster student engagement and improve retention?
At Kennesaw State, learning communities do not involve collaboration between departments of the Division of Student Success and the Division of Academic Affairs. Rather, they are strictly academic, requiring collaboration between the different colleges within the institution. These communities involve a cohort of about 25 students, all of whom take a set of two, three or four courses with one another. The students within the learning communities see one another frequently and often form study groups to complete their coursework, and in some cases, they form friendships.
The idea is to create a support group with other people having similar experiences. Some of our learning communities here at Kennesaw State are tightly coordinated amongst faculty, meaning that instructors often institute common themes into their syllabi and develop assignments relating to those topics. For example, faculty might design courses within a learning community so students would be reading something in one class and writing about it in another. While we believe this type of learning community fosters increased engagement and yields better student experiences, there are other learning communities that lack this faculty coordination. In those types of learning communities, the primary benefit is the student togetherness that helps them connect to campus and to one another.
We have not done it yet, but we plan to track retention data for these two types of communities. Our hypothesis is that learning communities with strong faculty collaboration will have an increased positive effect on retention. It’s important to remember, however, that learning communities themselves have a positive impact—this year, we found a three percent difference in retention for those students
participating in one and those not participating in one.
How do you leverage research (either independent or that of other organizations) to enhance retention efforts?
At Kennesaw State, we participate in the National Survey of Student Engagement. Also, we administer HERI’s CIRP-FY, the freshmen survey, during orientation and the complementary YFCY (Your First College Year) survey at the end of first year. These surveys allow us to compare student expectations to actual experiences, and we can use that data to see where we are able to apply additional effort to help students.
For example, if the first survey showed that students intended to use available support services and the YFCY showed that only a low percent actually used them, we would need to implement an early alert feature to make them more aware of the services available.
An EducationDynamics post-conference survey suggested that only two percent of attending institutions utilize early alert systems on campus. Do you find that number to be accurate?
That surprises me. I would think the number would be much higher. I would argue that anything that helps students to become more connected and successful should increase retention rates and therefore, should be implemented on campuses that have that goal. Three years ago, the American Association of State Colleges & Universities performed a study of graduation rate outcomes. Campuses did self studies and contributed their findings on what they did to increase and/or maintain high graduation rates. During the course of the investigation, certain programs and activities emerged that enabled institutions to be successful in cultivating student connections, and all were activities that other campuses could emulate to improve first-year retention and therefore, presumably, graduation rates.
Clearly, however, more important than specific programs and activities, two overarching factors emerged as particularly important: 1) a deliberate focus on student success from the top down, starting with the president of the institution, and 2) such initiatives being ingrained in campus culture.
In other words, every office on campus, including that of the president, must buy into the concept of student success. When an overarching objective of fostering student connection and student success is present, it’s not a matter of which specific programs are in place. Leadership and campus culture were the most important common themes emerging from the institutions surveyed, which basically tells us that student success should be intentional.
For example, one institution that participated in that research study had a Registrar’s office, a financial aid office and other service offices all located in one area of a building’s basement. Observation showed that no student that walked into this area waited more than a minute before someone came to them and asked what they could help with. Even when all employees were busy with students, the person escorting our team members would excuse themselves from their escort function to cater to the student. It was clear that students came first on that campus from an institutional standpoint, an approach that encourages connections for students when they know they are a priority. We should all try to emulate this approach to better serve our students and increase retention.
What’s next in your efforts at Kennesaw State?
Enhancing the collaborations we’ve been working on, and developing other retention initiatives that are of interest. One of the things we’re looking at doing is contacting by phone those students who have dropped out or stopped out to try to find out why they’re not coming back. It may be that they’re not coming back for reasons we can have no influence over. It could be family reasons, it could be financial, it could be work-related or any number of other things that might cause them to drop out. On the other hand, however, if it was simply because they didn’t make a connection with the institution, maybe a simple phone call from us can make a difference.
Dr. Ralph J. Rascati assumed the role of Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kennesaw State University on Oct. 1, 2002, and added the title of Dean of University College on July 1, 2006. Dr. Rascati first came to Kennesaw State in 1985 as an Associate Professor of Biology. In 1990 he was promoted to Professor and in 1997 he became Chair of the Department of Biological and Physical Sciences in the College of Science and Mathematics. He was born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, received his bachelor of science degree in biology from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. in 1969 and his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1975. He then spent four years as a Research Associate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.