Academic Support Playbook | 2024
7 Practices to Enhance Advising & Student Success
Analysis shows that advising is a top-performing student support investment, significantly impacting persistence and success. But, it’s not easy work. Its effectiveness varies, with nearly half of programs failing to improve student outcomes.1 This indicates the need for advisors to adopt a strategic, data-informed approach beyond routine meetings.
The most successful advising teams take a proactive approach to managing their entire caseload, using data-driven strategies that extend beyond students who actively seek assistance. This playbook compiles evidence-based practices from Civitas Learning’s partners, offering practical strategies to enhance the impact of advising and ensure meaningful student support.
1 Civitas Learning, What Really Works: A Review of Student Success Initiatives, 2019
Lesson 1: Don’t let student success advising be one team’s responsibility.
For institutions to have a meaningful impact on student success, a unified, campus-wide approach is necessary. Fragmented efforts can lead to student frustration as they have to repeat information to different departments on campus, and may result in a disconnect between academic and support activities.
To effectively support students, institutions should:
- Coordinate around one consistent source of information with real-time student data.
- Share notes and context to maintain visibility into a student’s progress.
- Ensure technology is adaptable to meet the specific needs of students, staff, and faculty.
Lesson 2: Individualization matters, but it doesn’t mean more work.
Students want to feel supported and understood as individuals, rather than just another number. As the number of students increases and their needs become more diverse, providing individualized support becomes more complex. It is important to use effective strategies to identify needs and optimize communication channels without increasing workload.
To provide individualized support at scale, institutions should:
- Have access to comprehensive student profiles to save time and enhance preparation.
- Utilize real-time analytics on persistence and completion to tailor outreach.
- Shift away from generic mass communications that often go ignored.
Use Data to Inform Your Engagement Strategy
Lesson 3: Identify potential barriers to student success through proactive, data-informed systems.
Focusing solely on academic barriers like low GPA may overlook the underlying “extra-academic” challenges that often impede students. Today’s students face obstacles that include mental health challenges, housing and food insecurity, family commitments, and work obligations, which can impact their educational progress.
To tackle these issues effectively, institutions should:
- Integrate and continuously update both academic and behavioral data in student profiles to provide a real-time, comprehensive view of each student’s situation.
- Utilize predictive analytics on students’ persistence likelihood to make timely adjustments and proactively guide students towards success, rather than relying on post-term data such as graduation rates and overall enrollment.
Use Leading Indicators of Success to equip Proactive Support
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