Student Services Program Review-Spring 2010 - Shasta College

A note about orientation data: Orientation occurs most frequently before studentsregister for courses, and for soon-to-graduate high school students, this meansmany months before they register for courses. This seems to be a particular issuewith 2007 Fall, and 2008 Spring and Summer terms where the orientation mayhave occurred in the Fall but was reported in the Spring, or occurred in the Springand was reported in the Summer, or occurred in the Summer and was reported inthe Fall. Thus, there is a timing issue between when the orientation occurs andwhen it is reported to the MIS. Fortunately, the information reported to the MIS issimply whether or not the student EVER attended an orientation. However, theactual timing of when that orientation occurred can only be determined usingDatatel information.2. Focus on First Time FreshmenThe focus of this analysis of the impact of orientation on student outcomes is onfirst-time freshman. We define a first time freshman as any student whose firstsemester at the college is Fall 2007 or after, who is between the ages of 17-19during that first term, and who has a student type of \: HS Enrichment (grades 11-12); Not a graduate of, not in HS; Received a High School Diploma; ReceivedGED/Certification of Equivalency/Completion; Received Certification or passed HSProficiency Exam; Foreign High School Graduate; or Pending HS graduate. Usingthis definition, there are 3,175 first-time freshmen who attended orientation sinceFall 2007 (Table 1). The majority of students (57%) attending orientation are firsttimefreshmen, and these first-time freshmen dominate at Spring orientationsessions.Table 14: Numbers of First Time Freshman Taking Coursesby Orientation Attendance Status2007U 2007F 2008S 2008U 2008F 2009SAttended Orientation 14 250 152 79 1,187 300Did Not Attend 2 2,671 330 173 892 414* NOTE: Recording orientation attendance began formally in 2007F, hence the number of firsttime freshmen who did not attend may be due to under-reporting attendance.3. Student OutcomesOne of the goals of a well structured orientation program is to introduce students tothe college‘s programs as well as to those services that can support studentsuccess. Given this goal, we hypothesized that students who attend an orientationwill do better in their courses, that is, have better academic outcomes, than thosewho do not.Analogous to what the Chancellor‘s Office does, we created a variable, EverOriented, to indicate whether or not a student has attended an orientation. Whilethere may be good analytic reasons to specify the term in which orientationoccurred, an examination of our data indicates that some first time freshmen havetaken courses at the college before they attended an orientation. Others attendedorientation, but registered for courses one-two terms afterwards. Given therelatively short time period since the collection of orientation data, we do not havesufficient data to look at timing effects. Thus, for this first examination of theimpact of orientation we use the simple Ever Oriented variable concept.- 40 -