Campus Units Leveraging Technology & Collaboration to Support Student Success
When it comes to student retention, many factors can impact a student’s decision to stay or leave the University. Now, more than ever, campus units are collaborating and leveraging technology to implement quick process changes, deliver timely communications, and offer better virtual resources to support students remotely.
Pass-Fail Grading Policy Option
In Spring 2020, the University of Arizona established a temporary pass-fail grading policy, allowing students to elect a pass/fail grade instead of a letter-grade for their courses. The Office of the Registrar with support from the UAccess Student team, helped implement the policy, while Trellis worked with the Office of the Registrar to launch a digital Change of Schedule/Late Change Petition Form that gave students an option to withdraw from courses online.
Senior Research Scientist Sarah Kyte from the Student Success & Retention Innovation (SSRI) team said collaboration, technology, and people all played a role in the pass-fail grading policy’s success, which resulted in positive outcomes for students.
“The University came together and the partnership between SSRI, the Office of the Registrar, Trellis, Student & Academic Technologies, and University Analytics & Institutional Research enabled this policy change to happen,” said Kyte. “The technology gave students the ability to conveniently change their registration status or their class schedules online. The people, including advisers and academic support units, let students know this option existed and helped them navigate the process.”
According to Kyte, about a third of undergraduate students opted into the pass-fail policy and most were students in their first or second year.
“We found that students were savvy shoppers and made strategic choices. Importantly, compared to otherwise similar students who didn’t opt in, students who used the policy passed more units, had higher GPAs, made bigger gains in their cumulative GPAs, and were more likely to be registered for fall.”
More information can be found in the Pass-Fail Grading Policy Adoption and Impact Analysis. A similar analysis demonstrated how the policy helped students on academic warnings and probation.
Exploring Key Indicators
As the need for technology and student support grows, so are the features and functions available in Trellis, the University’s enterprise constituent relationship management (CRM) system.
This month, new information was added to the CRM system to help provide more insight and awareness around the student academic journey. Three “key indicators” identified by a team of university researchers and analysts are now available to advisers, who currently use Trellis to manage and track their appointments and student interactions.
The indicators, found under the student contact record in Trellis, are displayed as flags to signal that a student has a higher risk of not re-enrolling in the University the following semester. These include under-enrollment (under 7 units), recent withdrawal from a course, and a recent drop in GPA.
The Trellis team is currently developing a custom Trellis dashboard to make referencing this information easier in the future. More information is available in the Key Indicators Explanation and Implications document.
“There is still so much to learn,” said Kyte, who led the research effort to surface the key indicators using historical data. “But being able to embed this information into a tool that advisers and staff use daily, makes this a big leap in using predictive analytics and technology to help support student success.”
Kyte said as the higher education environment continues to change, ongoing research will be important to understand how students are interacting with the University, because of factors beyond the classroom that impact student success and retention.
Digital platforms and enterprise systems like Trellis will continue to help the University gain insight into student interactions and engagement. By sharing this insight broadly, campus aims to empower staff and faculty to provide early intervention during critical student milestones.
For more information:
Visit Student Success & Retention Innovation at https://studentsuccess.arizona.edu/.
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