A first-year experience course, using high impact practices
Evaluation Plan and measures: First-time Full-time Freshman Retention Rates will be compared for students participating in DECK 1000, non-DECK students, and the retention from prior years.
KPIs:
- Development Stage: Completion of the development of course and faculty training program.
- After Implementation: First-time Full-time Freshman Retention Rates for DECK students compared to non-DECK students.
- Fall-to-Spring
- Fall-to-Fall
Baseline measure (for each KPI):
- Development Stage: The steering group is determining revisions to the course and creating a faculty training program.
- After Implementation:
For fall 2022 cohort of First-time Full-time Freshman:
- Fall-to-Spring retention rate: 79.0%
- Fall-to-Fall retention rate: 52.6%.
Current/most recent data (for each KPI)
- Development stage: The pilot version of the course is running at this time, including faculty training.
- After Implementation:
Fall 2023 data will be available once the course is fully implemented.
Goal or targets (for each KPI):
- Development stage: Completing the pilot and construction of the course, as well as the faculty training program.
- After Implementation: First-time Full-time Freshman students enrolled in DECK 1000 will have at least a 5% higher retention rate than students who were not enrolled in DECK 1000.
Time period/duration: Completion of development of the course will be in Spring 2024. We expect to fully scale and implement the course in fall 2024, and the evaluation of retention rates will be conducted in spring 2025 and fall 2025 respectively.
The course pilot has been successful; however, we feel there needs to be additional training for instructors and additional structure in the course syllabus and assignments. The group of instructors teaching the course has been meeting weekly, and we see that there are some changes that need to be made that will develop a community in the classroom earlier to increase student engagement and attendance. We would like to provide daily lesson plans to help guide the course more uniformly and to ensure that students enrolled in the course have a consistent experience.
We intend to continue the pilot group meetings throughout 2023, and in those meetings, we will continue evaluating the course, planning changes, and discussing potential lesson plans that will improve the course. We also plan to brainstorm methods to create community in the next cohort early on.
Challenges:
Student engagement and attendance have been an issue. This has hurt the sense of community in the class, so students don’t make attendance a priority. Those who have been attending seem to be succeeding.
Supports:
We need to partner more deeply with Student Life to ensure that we leverage their programming to assist the students in creating a community, and, perhaps, scheduling to place the course closer to times that have better attendance.
