Data and Teamwork Fueling Equity in Student Success

Aarti Dhupelia, Vice President and Founding Dean of the Undergraduate College, National Louis University

No single data point holds all the answers, nor does any individual faculty or staff member. However, thoughtfully tracking and collaborating around data to support students from orientation to employment – in a team of intentionally organized faculty and staff – can lead to higher and more equitable student outcomes. The Undergraduate College at National Louis University (NLU), which serves majority Pell-eligible, minoritized, and first-generation students and was recently recognized for driving social mobility, offers a replicable model for how weekly, quarterly, and annual strategic use of analytics can help higher education professionals to better support student success at scale.

Weekly Actions on Early Indicators of Student Success

K-12 school systems track student attendance daily and have found this to be a top predictor of student success, but many higher education institutions do not track attendance. Hypothesizing that student attendance would also be a top predictor of student grades and persistence in college, NLU set up attendance tracking as part of its online gradebook and requires every instructor of Undergraduate College synchronous classes to record daily attendance. Notably, the institution has found attendance to be the strongest correlate of student success year after year. Having this data available has enabled faculty and success coaches (academic advisors) to target student support strategies where they are most needed. For example: A student had been attending class and performing well but unexpectedly went absent for two weeks. Armed with this data, the professor texted the student and asked if everything was ok or if the student needed help. This action uncovered that the student’s mom had lost her job, and the student had taken a second job to earn extra money and had fallen off-track in class. Rather than fail the student, the professor offered extensions on some assignments and words of encouragement to help the student get back on-track, and the student earned an A in the end.

Furthermore, while at many institutions, course grades are based on only mid-term and final exams, NLU instead builds into universal course shells weekly or bi-weekly graded milestones so that student academic progress is assessed regularly throughout the term. This allows for ongoing understanding of students’ competency development, which enables both faculty instructional planning adjustments if there are course-wide struggles as well as early interventions with one-on-one learning support where there are individual student struggles. How does this happen? Data dashboards have been built to roll grades up by section, course, department, and for the whole college, so that everyone from individual instructors to chairs to the dean can view progress real-time. Faculty teams teaching a common course or in a common department meet every other week to examine their data transparently as a team. If, for example, one section of English 101 has unusually high grades relative to others, there is a

conversation about what instructional strategies that instructor is utilizing that others could learn from, or if one section has unusually low grades, the conversation may involve strategies to help that instructor better support student success. If everyone is struggling, universal strategies can be brainstormed.

“The institution has found attendance to be the strongest correlate of student success year after year. Having this data available has enabled faculty and success coaches to target student support strategies where they are most needed.”

Additionally, faculty regularly submit progress reports in NLU’s online student case management system (essentially flagging a red/yellow/green indicator), and faculty and success coaches meet every other week in a structure called student success collaboration (SSC) teams to discuss and decide specific student-level interventions – whether they are referrals to learning support, counseling, or anything else. Strategic use of analytics in these meetings can also drive scalable impact. For example: when grades were unusually low for all freshmen toward the end of a recent term, SSC teams were asked to focus “final push” intervention efforts on students with high attendance and low grades, as this subset of students had higher odds of catching up and finishing strong than students who had not been attending much at all. Subsequently, course grades did improve markedly by the end of the term.

Quarterly Data Review for Targeted Continuous Improvement

College-wide data reviews can also catalyze college-wide student support efforts. As an example, the NLU Undergraduate College leadership team – inclusive of academic, success coaching, career services, and analytics leaders – reviews a college-level dashboard of top key performance indicators (KPIs) every quarter, including KPIs such as term-to-term and annual persistence, course grades, credit attainment rates, graduation rates, employment rates, and student satisfaction rates. One fall term, what stood out was a significant drop in freshman to sophomore persistence rates and unusually low graduation rates for a cohort of seniors. For a first round of intervention, available data allowed the team to drill down on which freshmen and which seniors were in good academic standing but had not persisted or completed. It became clear that financial holds had held many of these students back, and because the college had a fund for emergency scholarships, success coaches targeted outreach to these students and offered the scholarships to bring them back. These efforts resulted in a boost in persistence and completion rates: more students achieving their postsecondary goals.

Quarterly data reviews of select KPIs have yielded countless additional learnings and actions, such as spurring revisions to courses with high DFW rates, or adding english language learner supports to first-year courses, or bolstering interview preparation for seniors who are applying for many jobs but not getting past their first interviews.

Annual Review of Macro Trends to Inform Strategic Planning

Annual college-level strategic plans also can and should be informed by college-wide data reviews. As an example, disaggregation by race of enrollment trends and persistence rates highlighted that NLU’s Undergraduate College, like many institutions, is not serving black students equitably: black student enrollment levels and persistence rates at NLU have declined in recent years. Internalizing this information as a call to action to do better, the college launched its Black Student Excellence initiative, targeting additional success coaching, student engagement, parent engagement, and enrollment strategies toward current and prospective

black students. While it is too soon to report outcomes on these efforts, early indicators suggest higher levels of black student engagement as a result.

Annual data reviews – considering both quantitative and qualitative data – have informed countless additional strategies at NLU. Investments to expand emergency scholarships occurred after seeing so many academically on-track students withdraw due to financial holds. A summer credit recovery program was created to help students get back on-pace to graduate after seeing many students fail or withdraw from a course due to work/life responsibilities taking over. Major and career development courses were incorporated into the freshman and sophomore year after students – having previously only taken general education courses in their first two years – demanded in focus groups getting earlier exposure to their careers.

Implications

The Undergraduate College at NLU is a relatively new college, having enrolled its first class of freshmen in 2015. While there is much room for improvement, early graduation and employment outcomes are promising. Students are, of course, the ones making it all happen, applying their talents and work ethic to achieve the goals they set for themselves. Faculty and staff work relentlessly and collaboratively to support students along their paths, and data provides an invaluable tool to accelerate and enhance the impact of the team’s work. The college’s approach to strategic use of analytics can be replicated at any institution willing to invest in: (1) Strategic analytics staff to construct high-impact dashboards; (2) Professional development of faculty and staff to use data to inform real-time practice; and (3) Faculty/staff time within their normal job responsibilities to regularly collaborate around the data to strengthen student support and outcomes.

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