Part A. Orienting and Engaging Students in Learning-Centered Education (Sunday, June 24)

Student success (including retention, achievement of desired learning outcomes, and completion of educational goals) depends in part on the degree and quality of each student’s engagement in the learning process, in and out of the traditional classroom. There are both institutional practices and student behaviors that are important to effective student engagement.

1. What student behaviors are most critically related to learning success? How does your college promote and support these behaviors?

   The CCBC Developmental Education Steering Committee has defined a number of student behaviors identified with successful learning for all students. These are as follows:

   1. Makes informed choices by thinking critically.

   2. Accepts responsibility for education progress and his/her role in the process.

   3. Demonstrates an understanding of who he/she is as a learner and a

   knowledge of learning techniques that are personally effective.

   4. Accepts and accesses resources as necessary.

   5. Demonstrates an ability to construct knowledge.

   6. Is able to learn from other students.

   7. Exhibits confidence as a learner.

   8. Appreciates diverse perspectives and recognizes the added value of these perspectives.

   We try to help students improve in these areas through our 3 credit hour Student Success course, which is required for all developmental reading students and recommended to non-developmental students who appear to be at-risk in other ways.

   Our learning communities foster the ability of students to learn from other students in a shared learning environment. Many of our developmental learning communities pair developmental reading and a credit course in general education. Students who enroll in the developmental learning communities are allowed to waive the reading prerequisite and instead, take the reading as a co-requisite. This pairing helps students transfer skills instruction to an authentic learning experience. In addition, it assist students in becoming more quickly integrated into credit courses. These communities employ the use of a Master Learner, a faculty member from a discipline outside of the Learning Community. This faculty member sits in on the credit course and conducts a one hour a week seminar to address many of the non-cognitive skills identified above and to discuss the content and requirements of the course. The Master Learner is trained using the Supplemental Instruction model.

   In addition, we work on the skills listed above in the Student Success Centers on each campus, through individual tutoring and through the use of computer inventories (taken on a walk-in basis) such as the LASSI (Learning Attitudes and Study Strategies Inventory), the LSI (Learning Styles Inventory, and the PEEK (Perceptions, Expectations, Emotions, and Knowledge).

   Our Learning Teaching Excellence Centers frequently have sessions for faculty and staff on addressing topics connected with successful learning traits. For instance, in a recent session on retention, student responsibility issues were discussed extensively. Other professional development activities such as our Symposium on Underprepared Students in August give faculty and staff an opportunity to learn how to be better learning facilitators. A final professional development activity, our CISL (Counsel on Student Learning) Fairs, offers many presentations on how to foster these attributes in students.

2. What key institutional practices at your college have been found to be linked to student retention and positive learning outcomes?

Our Developmental Learning Communities students on the Essex campus experience a semester to semester retention rate that is at least 10 percentage points higher than that of their peers. In addition, the students who participate in our three week summer
Pre-College Institute on the Essex campus, an intensive three-week developmental program that offers personalized orientation, also have a higher retention rate.

We believe that many other activities and approaches from individual campuses result in higher retention. Some of these programs include the Freshman Year Experience program on the Catonsville campus, the Early Intervention Program on all three campuses, and the Student Success Centers on all three campuses. Outcomes studies have not been done to document the value added of these programs.

3. What are your college’s best practices in student orientation and first-year experience?

Part B. Creating Learning-Centered Programs for Underprepared Students (Monday, June 25)

The learning college must have as a key priority the work of improving the success of its underprepared students. Unless this critical function is addressed effectively, the college will have fewer and fewer opportunities to excel in other arenas of learning. More is being learned, though, about the benchmark characteristics of programs that are demonstrating success with underprepared students.

1. What structures, policies, and processes have proven to be most critical in promoting the success of underprepared students at your college?

• Our assessment/placement policy, which is built into the Banner Student Information System system.
• Our developmental prerequisites, which have been considered for all courses, established for all general education courses, and monitored through Banner.
• The establishment of a data system through Banner to store all assessment/placement data.
• Course rosters which are distributed to all instructors of developmental courses and which have information about assessment/placement/course history in the discipline.
• Focus reports, created off of Banner, which provide data about enrollment, grades, etc.
• Campus coordinating committees which bring together reading, writing, math, testing, and advising coordinators who work with staff who work with developmental students.
• A system coordinating committee and individual responsible for coordinating the developmental curriculum and activities on the three campuses.
• The Student Success Course, required for upper level developmental reading students.
• The Student Success Centers, which provide tutoring in developmental and non-developmental areas as well as learning inventories.

2. What are the keys to creating information systems adequate to the need to track student progress and success at your college? What performance indicators will help your college know how effective its approaches actually are?

Having an integrated Student Information System and learning how to use it to the advantage of the developmental program is critical to developing tracking systems that will provide outcomes data. Appropriate warehousing of past data is also important. Underlying this system is the use of common exit criteria and measures for all developmental courses.

Ideally, the use of computer-read student identification cards for the library, tutoring and advising centers which can later connect into the student information system is ideal. We are not yet at that point. All three campuses, however, are now using the AccuTract system to collect and organize data concerning student use of the Student Success Centers.

To establish outcomes indicators such as pass rates and retention rates, we have used data from exemplary programs as identified in the literature. We have used discussion and consensus to identify non-cognitive outcomes. We plan to begin to measure these through the use of a qualitative methodology employing tools such as focus groups and surveys.

3. What diagnostic tools are being used at your college for effective assessment of student skills upon entry and appropriate placement in courses?

We use the Accuplacer for placement. Students are allowed one retest. If they are still not satisfied, they are allowed to appeal, using a different kind of test. We use the Nelson-Denny for appeals in reading, an in-house math test for appeals in math, and a standardized writing sample for appeals in writing. All students are given more diagnostic tests during the first week of class to further confirm their placement and to assist the instructor in planning for instruction.

4. In what ways is your college effectively working with middle and high schools to improve student preparation?

CCBC has an Early Intervention Program that provides testing in the high schools. At this point, we are testing small cohorts of students in about 10 area high schools. The high school counseling department provides the results (college ready, on-track, or not on track) to students. We have begun some limited interventions in the high schools. One intervention includes a small learning community in which tenth grade students in the lowest level of developmental reading take the reading course along with a computer course on the Dundalk campus. Another intervention consists of an after school math program. High School students are able to become Parallel Enrollment Students (PEP) and pay a reduced rate for tuition. We hope to expand the intervention phase of this project this year, with the encouragement of high school principals