The Challenge: Administrators and staff lacked the real-time information necessary to reach struggling students before it was too late.
The Strategy: Empower success teams to use institution-specific analytics and insights to uncover barriers faster and connect students to the most beneficial support.
The Outcomes: This ability to focus their work on specific student groups and provide tailored guidance led to a better student experience, improved student services, and a more collaborative approach.
Slippery Rock University (SRU), a regional comprehensive university in rural Pennsylvania, surfaced the need for a data-informed approach during its strategic planning process. To achieve its goal of an unwavering focus on success for all students, SRU needed a deeper knowledge of the challenges students face and a better understanding of which initiatives best support them.
SRU recognized they must invest in data-driven initiatives that increase student retention and graduation rates while also allowing them to identify the needs of different class cohorts and specific populations. This data-activated approach has resulted in
- Administrators know sooner and more precisely which students need support
- Student success staff working more efficiently and effectively thanks to enhanced workflow and communication capabilities.
- Improved willingness to collaborate on student success across the institution
A data-informed approach gives the SRU teams the insights and tools they need to take their success work to the next level. This ability to deepen their work has led to a better student experience, improved student services, and a more collaborative approach.
“The Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform provides our success coaches with invaluable information so they can intervene early and provide students with the support they need to stay on track to completing their degrees.”
— Dr. John Rindy,
Associate Vice President for Career and Academic Progress
Slippery Rock University
The Challenge: Lack of Real-Time Visibility into Student Need Limits Proactive Support
Before enacting a data-informed approach to student success, SRU administrators and staff lacked the real-time information necessary to reach struggling students before it was too late. Relying on lagging success indicators, such as mid-semester progress reports and final grades, frontline staff and administrators couldn’t see which students were struggling quickly enough to provide just-in-time support.
Without understanding the effectiveness of programs and outreach efforts on specific student populations, SRU program staff could not target their communication with the students who would benefit most from their services. And collaboration with other stakeholders remained difficult due to workflow inefficiencies and a lack of supportive tools to facilitate coordinated student care.
To better match students to the programs and services that offer the best support, SRU realized a need for improved visibility into their students’ challenges and the initiatives that work to support them best. And to reach students while their support can still make a difference, they needed a student success platform to help staff proactively identify struggling students and facilitate effective communication.
The Strategy: Using Institution-Specific Analytics to Provide Students with the Right Support at the Right Time
To achieve improved student outcomes for all, SRU needs a way to easily access institution-specific student success analytics to uncover barriers faster and connect students to the most beneficial support. The SRU team also needs intelligent case management systems to create efficiencies and streamline daily work so frontline staff can provide the level of proactive support needed to improve outcomes.
With the Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform, SRU can identify student challenges and monitor a comprehensive range of predictive insights (persistence likelihood, completion likelihood, powerful predictors of success, and more). The breadth of insights into everything that matters for their students allows the SRU team to go beyond generalized practices and identify particular student groups to engage proactively. The depth of insights and context means they can effectively personalize care and tailor interventions.
3 Data-Activated Practices the SRU Team Uses to Deliver Proactive Support:
- Monitor Real-Time Changes in Student Performance with Persistence Predictions
John Rindy, Associate Vice President for Career and Academic Progress, knows that providing student support to all requires identifying struggling students as soon as possible. Using the Civitas Learning Student Impact Platform to monitor each student’s likelihood to persist provides SRU faculty and staff with “invaluable information so they can intervene early and provide students with the support they need to stay on track to completing their degrees.”
The likelihood of students achieving their academic goals fluctuates over time, regardless of their background or academic history. Persistence predictions updated throughout the semester with in-progress academic and behavioral data (such as a student’s relative LMS activity) provide a more accurate and dynamic depiction of a student’s academic risk than predictive models that rely solely on historical and demographic data. The ability to monitor a student’s likelihood to persist changes throughout the term empowers the SRU team to provide just-in-time support that drives improved student outcomes.
Additionally, Academic success coaches can easily access and quickly prioritize early alerts submitted by faculty with the added context of other success metrics like a persistence prediction. Access to a breadth of insights provides context success coaches need to determine which alerts need immediate attention. Real-time information about student progress enables success coaches to connect with students who need their support for personalized coaching at the right time.
- Tailor Interventions with Powerful Predictors of Student Success
SRU leaders require more than just general trends to identify the needs of different class cohorts and specific populations. They need institution and student-group-specific data insights to design interventions that address unique opportunities to positively impact outcomes for their specific students.
Dr. Rindy utilizes institution-specific insights like the Civitas Learning platform’s Powerful Predictors to surface the top student success influences for specific student groups at SRU. Powerful Predictors highlight key factors that affect a student’s likelihood to persist. With additional timely insight, Dr. Rindy can make a specific action plan to support students who fall below a certain tipping point in a specific Powerful Predictor.
“We can be very direct about who we’re helping. We have limited resources and must ensure we’re applying those resources to the students who need us the most.”
— Dr. John Rindy,
Associate Vice President for Career and Academic Progress
Slippery Rock University
For example, when looking at Exercise Science majors, cumulative institutional GPA surfaced as a key factor in understanding persistence. Those students with 45 earned hours and a 3.0 GPA or lower were less likely to persist. Rindy found that these students often stopped out after realizing they were unlikely to be accepted to Physical or Occupational Therapy programs. This insight provided an opportunity to proactively connect these students with career resources and guidance to help students facing setbacks stay engaged in their major.
Access to actionable insights like Powerful Predictors enables Dr. Rindy to identify the precise factors most likely to influence students’ success and develop specific programming and communications to help students proactively. Dr. Rindy shares, “We can be very direct about who we’re helping. We have limited resources and must ensure we’re applying those resources to the students who need us the most.”
- Create Capacity for Proactive Support with User-Friendly Workflow Tools
Given the time-intensive nature of proactive student success work, incorporating user-friendly workflow tools to create efficiencies in daily tasks is critical to providing successful services at scale. Leaders and frontline success staff at SRU rely on integrated calendars, appointment notes, and email and SMS communication tools to efficiently and effectively engage with students, ultimately allowing them to make a more significant impact.
“It has been a game changer. As a busy staff member, it’s helpful to know I can still make my students feel cared about,” says Emily McClaine, Assistant Director for Academic Success, reflecting on how the Student Impact Platform has helped her keep student details straight.
The SRU team also uses dynamic and static student groups to coordinate their efforts to provide personalized student service. Static groups allow them to quickly and easily make lists of particular students they’d like to monitor. In contrast, dynamic groups allow them to automatically generate a list based on filters such as likelihood to persist or last advising appointment.
For example, when a faculty member presented a list of at-risk students in her beginning Algebra classes who had not accessed the online textbook resources, Dr. Rindy could create a static list to allow him to track these students. It also made it easy for him to use integrated email and SMS tools to remind them about the class requirement and refer them to academic support resources.
The Outcome: Insights and Efficient Workflow Empower Proactive Student Success at Scale
SRU’s investment in a data-informed approach to student success pays off in more ways than one. SRU’s retention rate remains one of the strongest in the state, and its six-year graduation rate now ranks first among schools in the Pennsylvania State System.
Additionally, using student success analytics and an intelligent case management platform streamlines work for frontline student success staff, allowing them to deliver proactive success for all cohorts and student groups. This makes it feasible for the SRU team to deliver proactive support and helps them ease the student experience by removing barriers to success.
“Where siloes and barriers previously existed, we’re now starting to see people want to share, discuss and collaborate in a way that isn’t territorial but is productive for student success,”
—Emily McClaine,
Assistant Director for Academic Success
Slippery Rock University
A data-informed approach also facilitates stronger collaboration for student success across the institution. “Where siloes and barriers previously existed, we’re now starting to see people want to share, discuss and collaborate in a way that isn’t territorial but is productive for student success,” states McClaine.
Shifting to a data-informed approach gives the SRU team the insights and tools they need to take their student success work to the next level. This ability to deepen their work has led to a better student experience, improved student services, and a more collaborative approach to student success. And it’s allowed them to make strides toward their goal to ensure all students persist toward timely graduation.
