Common Ground
“Progress towards a decade of student success”
2011 – 2016 Operational Plan
Common Ground is the continuance of a decade-long, campus-wide initiative designed to elevate our students to a higher level of achievement by strengthen the 21st Century learning experience. To reach these aspirations and continue our momentum, we must now strive to bring about deep change in the beliefs, norms, and structures of interactions between faculty, staff, and students by: setting measureable goals and targets; focusing on in-depth professional development; establishing cross-functional teams to tackle major challenges; and cultivating a safe climate for innovation.
Background
In the spring of 2006, MSU-Great Falls began its transformation towards an institution designed, and focused, on the success of our students. From 2006 till present, the college’s faculty, staff, and community have made many accomplishments towards that end. Over the next five years, we must continue this momentum and firmly establish MSU-Great Falls as a high-performing institution in regards to student success. The Community College Research Center’s (CCRC) Assessment of Evidence Series builds the foundation for our continued efforts. The CCRC’s work provides four general recommendations to guide us. These include:
1. Colleges should ensure broad engagement of all faculty becomes the foundation for policies and practices to increase student success, including active faculty involvement in student support programs and services.
2. Colleges should work to simplify the structures and bureaucracies that students must navigate.
3. Colleges should be encouraged to align course curricula, define common learning outcomes and assessments, and set high standards for those outcomes.
4. Colleges should collect and use data to inform a continuous improvement process.
Jenkins’ (2011) research identified seven practices of highly effective organizations. MSU-Great Falls is currently underway in many of these regards, and yet more work is necessary to ensure we are employing all seven of these practices in a concerted and coherent manner. To realize the transformational power of these practices, and to be effective, they must be implemented in concert, not isolation, and at scale. The seven practices are:
1. Strong Leadership: Inclusive leaders, across the organization, who are results oriented
2. Focus on the Customer: Student Centeredness
3. Functional Alignment: “institutional program coherence” or interrelation of programs for students (curriculum, instruction, assessment, climate, etc.)
4. Process Improvement: continued analysis of organizational processes to ensure programs and services improve over time
5. Use of Measurement: measureable goals, assessment, evaluation at all levels to inform process improvement and management decisions
6. Employee Involvement/Professional Development: employee understanding of organizational goals, and developed to lead the necessary reforms
7. External Linkages: Connections to K12 and four-year colleges and universities
Our Charge
We must now turn our efforts towards an aggressive approach to accelerating our progress to becoming a high-performing institution with regards to student success. We have established the foundation, structured the organization, and now we have identified the work remaining in the six following areas.
Goal I. Set and Achieve Institutional and Student Success Goals: We will establish clear, measureable goals for improved student success and institutional effectiveness. These will be communicated broadly and measured consistently.
Task A. Establish a new indicator that directly measures students’ success through the analysis of successful course completion, looking at the percent of students who earned a C- or higher in all coursework.
Task B. Using historical data, comparative peer data, and aspirational targets, establish FY12 goals for the College’s Core Indicators of Institutional Effectiveness. Communicate these via a special focus IR newsletter during early fall term, with continued communication through a variety of modes (blurb in Weekly News, video screens, Facebook, etc.).
Task C. Identify the 10 courses with the smallest percentage of successful student completions, and the primary gatekeeper courses with below-average rate of student success (institutional average in FY10 is 77%), and establish multi-year goals for improvement in these rates.
Task D. Create and maintain a SharePoint site where institutional reports (e.g., core indicator reports, enrollment reports, survey reports, etc.) can be shared with the campus community. Institutional Research will also start a documentation process for all reports so that any data used in reports can be replicated.
Goal II. “Close the Loop” on the Assessment of Student Learning: We will systematically align institutional/instructional expectations, instructional activities, and the assessment of student learning and institutionalize a process for capturing and analyzing student learning data.
Task A. Finalize the establishment of common student learning outcomes for all courses at the College (e.g., all ANTH 100 courses have common outcomes regardless of instructor or modality of delivery).
Task B. Design and/or identify common assessment protocols for measuring student learning on the established learning outcomes (e.g., all ANTH 100 courses would employ the same assessment protocols for measuring student achievement of the common learning outcomes).
Task C. Utilizing an institutionally adopted format, create rubrics for assessing the various levels of student learning on common learning outcomes for every course and program offered at the College.
Task D. Research, identify, and employ a college-wide system for storing student learning outcomes data and longitudinally tracking those data to track instructional improvement and target needed interventions to improve student success.
Task E. Implement the process for conducting assessments, recording student achievement of learning outcomes, and reporting those results.
Goal III. Strengthen Student Support Services and Programs: We will establish intrusive student support mechanisms that will (1) create social relationships for students, (2) help students clarify aspirations and enhance their commitment, (3) develop the “College Know-How” in students, and (4) help make college life feasible for our students.
Task A. Catalyzed by the establishment of a new advising center, redesign the advising process so that it is intrusive, streamlined, and personalized. The new advising process should be designed to utilize all campus resources, including faculty, as well as be tied to a student early alert system.
Task B. Building from the COLS 102 Pilot Course, design and implement a mandatory student success course, tied to orientation and advising, for all students new to the College. This course should include components modeled after best practices such as the development of an academic and career plan to be utilized in the advising process.
Task C. Create and implement a mandatory, extended, and expanded student orientation, tied to advising and the student success course that includes such things as orientation to placement testing, financial literacy education.
Goal IV. Enhance and Strengthen the Learning Process through Curricular and Pedagogical Reforms: Teaching is central to our mission, and thus it plays the largest role in whether or not our students succeed. We will reform and innovate in those areas with the greatest need and potential for increases student success.
Task A. Building from current research, reform and redesign the developmental education offerings to increase the percent of students who are successfully remediated for college-level coursework and at the rate in which they are remediated.
Task B. Implement enhanced instruction/ learning models and other reforms, including, but not limited to Supplemental Instruction, learning communities, paired courses, and/or contextualized learning, to increase the rate of student success in gatekeeper and “top 10” courses.
Task C. Establish mechanisms for predictive analysis of student success and to target intervention. This includes the establishment of a common grade reporting system, mandatory student attendance reporting/tracking, and frequent student progress feedback (e.g., quarterly grades or academic progress reports).
Task D. Increase student preparedness for online and technical courses through the development of a systematic means to evaluate incoming students’ basic computer skills, a remedial basic computer skills course, and by evaluating the current Introduction to Computer course (CAPP 120) in order to modify its curricula based upon program needs.
Task E. Research and Develop a Certificate of General Studies credential and curriculum, and shepherd it through the approval process for implementation.
Task F. Research and Develop a Certificate program or credential to recognize the completion of pre-requisite coursework for Health Sciences Programs.
Goal V. Strengthen External Linkages with K12 and University Partners: We will work to improve the relationships and interconnectivity between the College and our primary partners in the K12 and four-year university sectors.
Task A. K12 - through partnership with the Great Falls Public Schools, hire and deploy pathways advisors to: (1) offer college placement test orientation and testing in the high schools; (2) assist with college and financial aid applications and literacy; and (3) provide orientation and support services to college, college planning, and dual credit.
Task B. Universities - establish more formalized articulation agreements to provide opportunities for general education students intending to transfer that lead them effectively into a program of study early on.
Goal VI. Identify Key Points of Success and Challenge Our Students Face: We will establish interdisciplinary teams to track cohorts of entering students (first-time and transfers) along the continuum of initial engagement to student success to identify where students face irrevocable challenges in their educational journey.
Task A. Utilizing AACC’s Voluntary Framework of Accountability (VFA), identify key success points along the continuum of student success (e.g. completing developmental education, completing the first college-level course, achieving 15, 30, etc. college credits). Create cohort data sets of key student types (e.g. pre-health students, students of color, transfer students, traditional and non-traditional, etc.) and have teams follow their progress to identify areas where students struggle.
Task B. Taking the findings from above, make recommendations for improvements to services, processes or protocols to the appropriate individual or areas. Implement changes to improve student outcomes along the continuum of student success.
For more information see Bailey, Smith-Jaggars, and Jenkins (2011).