The CONSORTIUM for STUDENT RETENTION DATA EXCHANGE
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The UNIVERSITY of OKLAHOMA

An Easy, Cost-Effective Way To Remain Current With Student Success


Twelve presentations are selected from the top rated sessions at our National Symposium on Student Retention each year for live presentation as webinars.

All webinars take place from 1:00 – 2:00 pm Central Time on the designated date, during which time participants may ask questions and provide feedback. An unlimited number of colleagues from the registrant’s institution may attend. CSRDE members and non-members are invited to participate. Each registration includes 5 weeks of access to the recorded podcast.

"We have found the CSRDE webinars to be an essential value-added component of our membership. The menu of award-winning presentations by colleagues who have “walked the walk” makes this option a convenient, efficient, and economical way to maintain both currency and contacts in our field. This webinar platform provides easy scheduling along with - yet another featured bonus! - options to share within our organizations. The level of coordination and support of these programs from the CSRDE staff/team is always amazing, always professional."
John Rollins, Director, Academic Performance Studies
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University

Webinar Cost
  • CSRDE members:
    One to six webinars are included with membership, depending on level
  • Add'l webinars for members:
    $129 each
    $79 each for blocks of 3 or more
  • Non-CSRDE members:
    $229 each

2010 - 2011 Webinar Series

Charles Harrington, University of North Carolina-Pembroke

Billie Hunt, University of North Carolina-Pembroke

A significant gap exists in the educational achievement levels of American Indian students and the general student population despite gains attained in various avenues of education reform. A college education is a significant driver in the socioeconomic advancement of American Indian communities. Numerous factors impact the admission, persistence and timely graduation of American Indian students from institutions of higher education. This issue has a direct correlation to the significantly low numbers of doctorally-prepared American Indian faculty in academia.

Jaclyn Cameron, DePaul University

Community colleges have been regarded as important stepping stones on the path to student success. The primarily general education curriculum along with the availability of pre-college level coursework offered at the community college provides a low cost, local opportunity to strengthen academic profiles. This research supports the argument that community college enrollment can be key to student success. The study will compare first time freshmen, admitted non-matriculated students who entered later as community college transfer students, and denied applicants who entered later as community college transfers. First, 4-, 6-, and 8-year graduation differences will be compared. Second, entering academic profile information (including high school GPA and ACT scores) of the groups will further distinguish differences in graduation rates. Lastly, the expected graduation rates of the transfers, based on if they had entered as freshmen, will be modeled from freshmen academic profiles, and compared to actual rates. Issues concerning time between first application and transfer entry, full versus part time enrollment, and number of hours transferred in will be related to the findings. This research has implications for strengthening support for community colleges, institutional partnerships, dual enrollment programs, and pre-entrance advising.

Philip Garcia, California State University Chancellor''s Office

This presentation will provide an examination of a system-wide remediation policy’s impact on promoting higher graduation rates across the California State University. To assess the efficacy of the policy, graduation rates for first-time undergraduates who were not proficient at entry (i.e., they had to take remediation classes) were compared to graduation rates for first-time undergraduates that were English or math proficient at entry (i.e., they did not have to take remediation classes). The all important assessment was identifying those students that successfully completed their remedial work. The assumption was that if students that gained proficiency by taking remedial courses earned degree at the same rate as students that were proficient at entry, then the policy would seem to be working as expected. Separate results were computed for those that needed remedial instruction in math, English, or both subjects.

Cathy Alexander, California Lutheran University

Maria Kohnke, California Lutheran University

Angela Naginey, California Lutheran University

California Lutheran University is intentionally taking a comprehensive approach to improving its graduation and retention rates as suggested by current retention literature. The resulting Retention Plan is one that addresses the current challenges and proposes solutions to address those challenges on a campus wide basis. The collaborative nature of this plan and goal includes all campus constituencies (faculty, staff and students) to identify, problem solve and implement solutions to the goal of retaining and graduating a well prepared and diverse student body. The first part of this presentation will review CLU''s undergraduate retention plan, the process followed and data used in the creation process. Assessing retention of graduate programs presents different challenges than with undergraduate retention. The remaining portion of the presentation focuses on the data gathering process for evaluating retention in graduate and adult programs.

Kathrynn Di Tommaso, Bronx Community College, CUNY

Attrition rates in programs for developmental students are often extremely high because students experience challenges beyond academic skills in their pursuit of higher education. Programs must be attentive to the ways in which non-cognitive variables (environmental and socio-affective factors) influence students'' experiences to better retain students. This presentation discusses a qualitative study conducted at a community college that investigated the importance of non-cognitive variables to a cohort of developmental writing students. Findings demonstrated that students associated increased engagement and a desire to remain in college with faculty members who cared about their lives, experiences, perspectives, and progress. However, the ways in which some students defined '"caring'" involved a desire for instructional practices that could actually hurt their educational success. These results indicate that faculty may need to change their definitions or help students redefine what it means to be a '"caring teacher'" for positive effects on retention to occur. Specific suggestions for positive teacher-student relationships, effective instructional methods, and future research are offered.

Elizabeth Child, Trinity Washington University

Cristina Parsons, Trinity Washington University

This session discusses the use of curricular reform initiatives to improve first and second year student retention, using the experience of Trinity Washington University’s College of Arts and Sciences as the point of departure.  Trinity’s CAS is a small, historic, Catholic liberal arts college in Washington, D.C. serving undergraduate women.  Most of Trinity’s undergraduate women are first-generation college-goers and they present with widely disparate levels of college preparedness.  Three years ago, Trinity implemented a new, highly structured, assessment-friendly General Education curriculum aimed at improving both learning outcomes and student retention.  Linchpin components of this curricular reform include foundational skills courses, Learning Communities, mastery grading, and early alert data collection and management.  Retention is a key indicator in institutional assessment of outcomes from this reform.  Trinity’s outcomes data show that student retention has improved significantly while academic probations have decreased.  These indicators suggest that Trinity is both retaining a higher percentage of students and preparing them better to succeed academically.  In addition to being significant to Trinity, CAS’ strategies and results may be helpful to other institutions serving undergraduate students who present with significant risk factors.

Patricia Mulkeen, Austin Peay State University

Melissa Gomez, Austin Peay State University

Academic success of students is measured regularly.  Today, most higher education institutions determine the propensity for success in university-level course work in two ways:  the ACT and SAT and high school GPA.  While those indicators are important, many students are coming to public universities that serve unique populations based on the areas in which they are located.  Students enroll full of enthusiasm and sure of their success.  Yet, even those who would appear to be sufficiently prepared do not succeed.  Austin Peay State University serves a population with characteristics of low income and low educational attainment.  The majority of students receive some form of student financial aid; more than half enter with mathematics deficiencies and many with reading and writing deficiencies as well.  In order to learn more about the relationship between non-cognitive factors and academic success, we now administer the TCI to incoming freshmen during orientation.  The results have revealed that assumptions we often made simply were not true.  This presentation will provide some insight into assessment needs in a very complex academic world.

Patrick Perry, California Community College Chancellor''s Office

This presentation will provide an in-depth update on the various efforts underway to measure the progress of students in two-year institutions, including post transfer metrics of students that have continued onward through the baccalaureate. Community Colleges have received a great emphasis on constructing meaningful baseline progress metrics, and now national efforts are attempting to set standards for progress and also create alternative measures of success unique to the two-year sector. A critical factor in creating meaningful rates is determining who at a community college campus is truly degree-seeking, and measuring similar students at each campus; confounding factors include levels of remediation upon entry, full-time status of students, and other socioeconomic factors out of the control of the campus.

Daniel Jones-White, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Peter Radcliffe, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

Linda Lorenz, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities

While the literature on postsecondary student success identifies important academic and social factors associated with student outcomes, one question that persists concerns the influence of financial aid. We use the National Student Clearinghouse’s StudentTracker service to develop a more complete model of graduation, transfer success, or dropout. Multinomial regression techniques reveal that need aid appears to equalize the odds of success for receiving students, use of loan aid appears to encourage students to search out alternative institutions or drop out entirely, and merit aid appears to increase the likelihood of the receiving student remaining and graduating from their entry institution.

Susan Liebau, Michigan Technological University

Kerri Sleeman, Michigan Technological University

Retention is a key part of institutional success. It is important for the university community to understand strengths and areas for improvement.  The first step in gaining this understanding is a retention review. There are many variables that exist between institutions with regard to whether their retention is considered successful: type of institution, whether standard or effective retention is the focus, the specific populations they are seeking to retain, etc. A retention review provides an opportunity to look at overall retention and also focus on specific groups that have been historically successful or challenging, and utilize that information to develop a retention plan that encourages overall retention.  According to Noel-Levitz (2005), prior to developing a retention plan, a number of steps must be taken, including a review of historical retention data, a review of retention data by program and various student characteristics, a comparison with available national retention data, a review of retention literature, and the identification of successful retention strategies already in place.  This discussion will share the process of completing a retention review using current staffing and readily available data.  Lessons learned from the authors experience will be shared.  The web seminar will include time for questions and answers.

Jennifer Cannon, University of Arkansas Community College at Batesville

The focus of this webinar is starting retention efforts on a small campus with a limited budget.  We know that to increase student success there are several broad strategies we need to follow.  We need to engage students in the college experience and their education, promote peer-to-peer relationships, encourage faculty to student relationships, and help students set career goals.  This webinar provides easy and innovative ideas to engage students and provide tutoring, career counseling, and other helpful services with a limited budget.  It will include what has been learned and adopted from others such as Noel-Levitz, media searches, visits to other institutions and Ozarka TRiO and Career Pathways programs. The strategies in this presentation focus on helping students set and achieve career goals, working with other groups and individuals on your campus to provide things such as workshops, tutoring, and other forms of student engagement.  Additional topics include a student success center, intrusive advising, and faculty, student and family newsletters.  This presentation will provide practical solutions you can use on your campus immediately.

Mary Lou D''Allegro, Pennsylvania State University-Berks

Stefanie Kerns, Pennsylvania State University-Berks

Data mining and statistical analyses at a less selective institution revealed that the relationships between parents’ education level and pre college, first year success indicators, and six year graduation are not linear.  Specifically, students who report that either parent(s) or guardian(s) have an education level beyond a baccalaureate degree or do not report parent education level fair worse on some first semester and first year success indicators as well as some pre-college enrollment characteristics than those students whose parent(s) or guardian(s) have a baccalaureate degree.  Several inferential statistics were employed.  These statistical techniques as well as the results, implications, and interventions are the primary topic of the webinar.

Register

CSRDE institutional members sign up for webinars using their membership registration forms. The number of webinars depends on the level of membership. If your institution is a CSRDE member and you would like to participate in a webinar, email csrde@ou.edu and we will put you in contact with the CSRDE representative on your campus. If you are an individual member, your membership includes one webinar. If neither you nor your institution are CSRDE members, you may use this form to register for a webinar.

If you are interested in purchasing podcasts from previous years’ presentations, please review the information using the dropdown box above for each year.

Accessing the Webinar

For each webinar, CSRDE will send the following emails:

  1. One to two weeks before webinar – Confirmation of your registration plus instructions to test your computer for compatibility. You may test your system now.
  2. One day before webinar – Login information and instructions for accessing the webinar
  3. Registrants will have five weeks in which to access and review the podcast and share the link with other colleagues at your institution.
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The Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange at the University of Oklahoma is a consortium of two-year and four-year institutions dedicated to achieving the highest levels of student success through collaboratively sharing data, knowledge, and innovation.