Student Services Program Review-Spring 2010 - Shasta College

The Counseling Center and Matriculation Committee has raised the question, areboth alert cycles needed or is the 10 th week cycle sufficient? The answer to thisquestion depends on the goals of the program, and how students are respondingto the alert. The data suggest that:More faculty participate in the 10 th week alert. Perhaps this is because the 5 thweek is too soon in the semester to identify students who are struggling.Once alerted, more students drop the course after the 10 th week alert, than afterthe 5 th week alert.Once alerted, students who do not drop the course have poor outcomes asmeasured by retention or success rates. No conclusion regarding 5 th weekversus 10 th week alert can be made since the data are not very consistent.Whether or not a 10 th week alert is sufficient depends in large measure on what thepurpose of the alert. At the 10 th week, it is hard for students to do more than dropthe course.These findings suggest that more information is required, from faculty andstudents, in order to more fully understand what impact the program has onstudents. Three surveys are proposed.a. Faculty Participants: The survey would elicit from them what they see as thegoal of the alert, why certain courses are selected (even among participants,not all courses are included in their alerts), what action they would like to seefrom their students, etc.b. Faculty Non-Participants: This survey would elicit from them their reasons fornot participating. The design of this survey could be informed by what islearned from the faculty participant survey.c. Alerted Student Survey: This survey would ask them the reasons theyperceive for the alert, what actions they considered after getting the alert,and what opinion they have regarding the Early Alert program.6. Improvements to the Early Alert ProgramIf we continue an Early Alert program, we should develop consistent procedures indata collection to facilitate monitoring trends and assessing the program‘s impact.For example, there was little consistency across the various spreadsheets in eithercontent or format of the information provided. We should also consider whatadditional questions we want to explore using these data. For example, if we thinkthat there is a difference between full-time/contract faculty versus part-time/adjunctfaculty, we should either include this data or have complete faculty names so thatthis information can be more easily included.- 37 -