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Campus Compact Connect2Complete Student Retention Program Presentation
The document describes the Connect2Complete program, which aims to support community college students in completing academic credentials through peer-assisted community engagement and advocacy strategies. It is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and implemented through partnerships between Campus Compact and community colleges in Florida, Ohio, and Washington. The program targets developmental education students and low-income students, and employs peer advocates to facilitate service-learning and help students develop relationships and navigate college resources. An evaluation is being led by Brandeis University.
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Campus Compact Connect2Complete Student Retention Program Presentation
- 1. Connect2Complete A Campus Compact program funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation February 2013
- 2. Connect2Complete CampusCompact seeks to educate citizens and build communities by advancing civic engagement and the civic purpose of higher education through a national network of state affiliates, member institutions, and partners.
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- 4. Connect2Complete C2C Goals •Students aresupported in their goals of achieving academic success and credentialed completion. •Students are more engaged with their peers, the community college, and the broader community.
- 5. Connect2Complete Sub-Grantees Florida Ohio Washington Florida Campus Ohio Campus Washington Campus Compact Compact Compact Broward Cuyahoga Big Bend Miami Dade Lorain County Edmonds Tallahassee Owens Green River
- 6. Connect2Complete C2C Partners •Evaluators BrandeisUniversity - Aggregate student record data - Surveys •Community College National Center for Community Engagement (CCNCCE)
- 7. Connect2Complete Target Students Developmental EducationStudents Students taking developmental education courses have a longer route to completion and, therefore, are less likely to graduate than students not needing remediation. Low-Income Students Economically disadvantaged populations are found to persist and/or graduate at lower rates than their counterparts (Bailey, Jeong and Cho, 2009).
- 8. Connect2Complete Strategies •Peer Assisted Community-EngagedLearning •Peer Advocacy Both of these strategies encourage academic and personal development and social integration, key factors for student retention.
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- 10. Connect2Complete Role of the Peer Advocate Peer Assisted Community-Engaged Learning •Introduce students to service-learning pedagogy •Develop/maintain relationships with community or campus partnerships •Facilitate reflection •Plan workshops that connect service and coursework to civic learning outcomes
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- 12. Connect2Complete Role of the Peer Advocate Peer Advocacy •Explore identities, life experiences, self-concept to help develop a college staying identity •Encourage development of relationships •Orient students to services and resources •Help students develop college know-how •Guide students in ways that make college life easier
- 13. Connect2Complete C2C Models Course-Based Co-Curricular Community-Engaged • Service-learning Service-projects with Learning • PAs collaborate with reflection supported by faculty PAs and student affairs staff Peer Advocacy Occurs formally and Occurs formally and informally during and outside informally outside of class of class time. time.
- 14. Connect2Complete Peer Advocate Incentives a.FederalWork Study funds b.Credit or non-credit leadership development training c.Credit or non-credit leadership development training and an AmeriCorps Ed Award
- 15. Connect2Complete C2C Faculty FellowsCommunity of Practice Goals •Interact and build relationships - help each other solve problems and answer questions - network across teams •Accumulate and disseminate knowledge
- 16. Connect2Complete Activities of theC2C Faculty Fellows Fall 2012 •Calls/meetings within state •Online learning community •Prof development activities (state/campus based) Winter/Spring 2013 •Faculty Fellows Institute •Collaborative service-learning/peer advocacy project •Campus based activities
- 17. Connect2Complete Q&A ?????
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- 19. Connect2Complete References Bailey, T., Jeong,D.W. & Cho, S.W. (2009). Referral, Enrollment, and Completion in Developmental Education Sequences in Community Colleges. CCRC Working Paper No 15. Campus Compact. (2010). Increasing College Access and Success through Civic Engagement. Issue Brief. Print. Crisp, G. (2010). The impact of mentoring on the success of community college students. The Review of Higher Education, 34(1), 39-60. Humphreys, D. (2012) What’s Wrong with the Completion Agenda – And What We Can Do About It. Liberal Education, 98(1).
Editor's Notes
- #2 Welcome to today’s presentation on Connect2Complete, a program of CC … I am _______. [Other presenters introduce themselves]. I’m going to start with an overview of C2C from the national perspective. Next….. [go through the flow of the presentation]. Transition: Before I begin discussing C2C, I’d like to tell you a bit about Campus Compact.
- #3 Here’s our mission statement. [Give them time to read.] Who are we? A membership org made up of 1200 college and university presidents committed to this work. 35 state affiliates who work with colleges to connect students and course outcomes to community impact. CC provides faculty development, resources, advocacy and capacity building to support this work. National office helps to build the capacity of the state offices through academic resources, board/staff development, advocacy and prof development. PAUSE Actually, what’s unique about this C2C grant is that it’s centralized at the national office which doesn’t typically run programming, Transition: What is the issue that C2C addresses and how is C2C connected to Campus Compact’s mission?
- #4 Campus Compact has three priority areas: access and success, community economic development and global citizenship. PAUSE C2C came about as a result of the access and success focus. In 2010, CC wrote a white paper looking at community engaged learning as a strategy for increasing student persistence. It was the white paper that really brought Campus Compact to the attention of The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We see Connect2 Complete as a perfect fit for Campus Compact because it provides a way to gather more evidence that community-engaged learning does in fact have positive impacts on student retention. Transition: Let’s start at the beginning. The C2C program work really began with campuses in January of 2012. We launched the program with two goals.
- #5 [read goals] Transition: With that quick overview of C2C, I’m going to talk about the institution level players since without them, this work would not be possible. The key players are the subgrantees. These are the people doing the work.
- #6 With funding from the B & M Gates Foundation, we subgranted to the community colleges and related Compact state affiliates you see here. These subgrants began in Jan of 2012. That first semester was really a “pilot of the pilot” so the fall of 2012 – this past semester - is really the first semester of full implementation. Transition: Next I’ll talk about our project partners who support the work.
- #7 Our first partner is Brandeis. Campus Compact is working with Brandies to conduct an evaluation of the pilot. Evaluation methods include gathering aggregate student record data for the C2C students and a comparison group and pre-post surveys of the C2C students and retrospective surveys of the PAs. There are 2 goals of the evaluation: 1. to evaluate the success of the program by looking at factors such as semester-to-semester retention, GPAs and commitment to community engagement 2. to identify best practices to codify key elements of a C2C model. This will help us to expand the program to more states and colleges beyond the pilot period. Our second partner is CCNCCE. CCNCCE provides support through training and dissemination of the work (webinars, scholarships to conferences, trainings). T: These are the institutional level players. Now let’s look at the specific population of community college students the program serves.
- #8 Research shows that low-income students in dev ed courses are among the most vulnerable students. [read dev ed sentence on slide] Developmental education courses are for underprepared community college students and are designed to get these students ready for college-level coursework. [read low-income slide] Transition: what does C2C do to engage these students?
- #9 There are two primary strategies. The first is peer assisted community engaged learning. Community engaged learning is defined here to mean collaborating with a community in ways that meet local needs or interests while supporting student learning. The second is peer advocacy – or more commonly referred to as peer mentoring. If you look at the retention literature, strategies that encourage academic and personal development as well as social integration are the most promising practices for retention. Peer mentoring and community-engaged learning do both. Transition: Next I’m going to focus in on Community-Engaged Learning as a strategy for reaching students.
- #10 The Campus Compact white paper published in 2010 (that I referred to earlier) looked at the research on the impact that community-engaged learning has on student persistence. I’m going to quote Yeh, Eyler and Giles who talk about community-engaged learning as: a high quality learning experience that promotes: academic integration and performance, bolsters social competence and capital, and empowers students to develop self-efficacy and autonomy. The CC white paper also examined the ways that participation in these activities increases student interest in community change work and prepares them to become critically, civically and globally minded citizens. This is core to both Connect2Complete and Campus Compact’s mission. Transition: What do students really do to support community engaged learning?
- #11 You’ll see here a list of the four primary ways that students support their peers with community-engaged learning. 1. Introduce students to service-learning pedagogy: offer student perspective, support faculty Partnerships: develop relationships, organize orientation, coordinate logistics Before during and after reflection – so that students are thinking about their experiences and connecting them to course outcomes 4. Co-facilitate with faculty workshops on the “isms”, oppression, power, root causes of social issues Transition: And the second strategy is peer advocacy.
- #12 Students themselves are an incredibly under-utilized community college resource, and there exists an opportunity and a need to engage them. We know a lot about the impacts of negative peer pressure, but there is also a lot to be said for positive peer relations. There’s a body of literature focusing on the positive impacts of mentoring. I’m going to quote Crisp who writes that mentoring directly impacts students’ ability to integrate both academically and socially through key relationships and support networks, thereby influencing students’ intentions to persist in college (Crisp, 2010) . Other experts in the field, Mangold and Astin argue that mentoring also has positive impacts on students’ self-confidence, self-actualization, expectations and future aspirations, which in turn improve college persistence (Astin, 1999; Mangold, 2003) Focused primarily on cohort based mentoring. Transition: In what ways do students mentor their peers?
- #13 The first thing people often talk about with mentoring is orienting students to services and resources – this is the traditional approach. It’s very important, but if students don’t feel like they belong, that they see themselves as college students, the instrumental things like resources, etc…. won’ t matter. So I start with exploring identity and self-concept. First, Identity and motivation Explore students’ motivations and multiple identities and how this connects with a college staying identity Second, Development of relationships Peers, faculty, advisors Third, Orient students to services Referrals for academic support, child care, student advising, financial aid, public assistance College Know-How – the unwritten rules Knowing when and how to ask for help How to “work” bureaucratic systems The importance of attending class Differences between high school & college And ultimately guide students in ways that make college life easier It might be something like, goal setting, time and stress management, balancing work/study/family responsibilities Transtion: I have talked about the 2 strategies, now I want to focus on how they are implemented in the colleges. With a model.
- #14 The C2C models fall into 2 broad categories – course-based and co-curricular. On the left you see the two key strategies. If you look across, you’ll see how these strategies play out in course based and co-curricular models. C2C started with two models and continues to believe that the ideally campuses would have curricular and course based approaches; however, we’ve found in our pilot programs that the course based approach achieves the outcomes we’re working towards. T: I’m going to shift gears to look at what makes PAs interested.
- #15 There are several things. Campuses were given freedom to design a program that would reflect the campus’s unique culture. However, we did have one requirement that campuses choose one of three mechanisms for incentivizing peer advocate participation which you see here. [Read slide.] There are of course other intangible incentives: experience of helping others, resume, develop skills, etc. Transition: Now I want to focus on the role of the faculty. When when we recognized that the course-based approach is the strategy that holds real promise, we developed a learning community to provide professional development and community-building opportunities for dev ed faculty.
- #16 We began the C2C Faculty Fellows Community of Practice in the fall of 2012 by working with the 9 C2C campuses to recruit 2 dev ed/college success faculty from each campus. Selected faculty fellows shared an interest in peer assisted service-learning and peer advocacy. Campus Compact brought this Community of Practice together in a variety of ways. The goals of the group are as follows: [Read slide]. T: so how are the faculty fellows going about this work?
- #17 [Read through slide.] T: We’ve covered some territory. I’d like to stop now and ask for your questions.
- #19 The pilot shows a lot of potential. We’re in the midst of collecting data. …. Campus Compact has begun the process of working with the Compact state affiliates to reach out to additional community college campuses across the country that may be interested in C2C. We’re working together to identify financing models for C2C with an emphasis on securing new funding sources and leveraging and repurposing existing revenue streams such as work study. If this is something that appeals to you, you can speak to me about the program afterwards and/or contact Compact affiliates in your state.