Cycle Two
Cycle Two Research Question:
If I provide Academic Advising Sessions online and through social media tools will students’ knowledge of STEM Transfer requirements and desire to attend BCOE improve?
Cycle Two ActionsA. Continue conducting online advising
B. Ask admissions, community college counselors and previous transfer students for some key concepts that STEM transfer students need to be made aware of. C. Create a pre and post advising survey to measure growth in knowledge regarding these concepts D. Record the number of students that participate, and the data from the surveys During my second cycle April 19th through June 1st I continued to make myself available for online academic advising through e-mail, social media, specifically Facebook and Google + and CCC confer. I cut down my 4-hour intervals of “open” appointment times for community college students to meet with me Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays to two-hour intervals. I did this after getting approval from my boss to telecommute and have a more flexible schedule to meet the demands of students that wanted to meet on weekends. Evidence to be EvaluatedOf the 350 students that took the first or “pre” survey only 256 students took both the pre and the post-survey. These students were entered to win a $50.00 card to the UCR bookstore. I am not sure what sort of impact this had on motivating the students as it was written into the survey design from the beginning. Unlike the cycle one survey where a gift card was added as a motivational tool only after I received a poor participation rate. Please see the tables T6 and T7 showing the questions asked and number of correct answers.
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Artifacts CollectedAt first boss pushed me to use CCC confer more as it is a more secure format and doesn’t involve student’s personal social media accounts. Two of the three partner campuses preferred this format also because it allowed them to keep recordings of the student meetings if desired. These sessions only happened twice this cycle however, due to the fact that students told me they disliked the CCC confer format (i.e. illuminate) and didn’t want to have to go on campus to meet with me. Beyond verbally telling me this, the students proved this to be the case by not showing up for CCC confer sessions. I set up one appointment a week for CCC Confer sessions with the STEM CC Counselors but the students that signed up to attend these sessions rarely ever showed.
Hi Jun, I wanted to discuss the use of CCC confer with you when you have a chance. I keep setting up meeting times with the community college counselors but there are very few if any students to meet with. The turn out for these sessions are a lot like the STEM forums the transfer center set up at the schools last year. If it keeps going this way I will not meet the projected number of students I gave you earlier. I would like to go back to focusing on advising students through e-mails and social media sites. I have created a STEM face book site and fan page that we can utilize. If I have the students do the survey before we begin advising I can keep a record of who is met with and when, and still delete the information from the social media sites after the sessions are over so others can’t see who or when students are met with. Before creating my survey I asked my COP what they believed are key STEM transfer information that students seemed to be lacking in. I took the answers provided by counselors, advisors, and past transfer students and then compared them to the goals of my program and came up with my questions. The pre and post-surveys themselves are very short, only 8 questions regarding STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math majors) are asked. The remainder of the questions asked for basic information regarding the student. The key concepts meeting information and COP participants are listed below in table T5
In order to get better participation and also as a way to keep better records for myself, I made students take the online “UC Riverside BCOE HSI Academic Advising Form a survey” before meeting with me. For the most part this worked out well because the students would get online with me and I would send them the link http://bit.ly/NzMe2o to go complete the survey while I waited. The survey itself was very short, only 8 questions regarding STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math majors) were asked. The remainder of the questions asked for basic information regarding the student.
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Evaluation MethodThe goal of this cycle was not merely to observe the attitudes toward online advising but to actually measure if there was any growth in knowledge after online advising occurred. In order to measure the growth of knowledge I decided to compare the percent of students that got all of the 8 STEM questions correct. Of the 256 students surveyed the knowledge of STEM transfer requirements grew from 36% to 67%. This is a growth from 91 to 174 students. From this information we see that students knowledge of STEM transfer requirements did grow through online academic advising.
When I shared this information within my Community of Practice (Other Academic advisors at BCOE and at the community college) they were surprised. In my COP there seemed to be a feeling that online advising would not provide the needed platform for advisors to share information and have students remember it but rather leave students with quick, and somewhat cold experience. One particularly staunch advocate of face to face advising has become intrigued with the idea of online advising and will conducting as a test run of sorts all of his advising over the summer online. After reviewing this data and sharing it with my boss, he brought up a very good idea which is to next time compare the amount of time between when each student submits the first survey and when they submit the second survey. I will do this to see if the amount of time that lapses between each one will make a difference in the student’s responses. When I do these surveys again next year I will not let the students know that there will be a post survey later. This way I will gain more insight to see if the students are just remembering what I say in order to go and take the survey again (and win the gift card) or if they are truly learning about the requirements to transfer. Next time I will also post the link to the survey on our face book to try and gain more responses. |