LEAP Campus Toolkit

The Roadmap Project includes a dozen community colleges poised to become national models in supporting student success. Collectively, these leadership institutions work to take what are often isolated and independent student success efforts and create an integrated roadmap to support both student persistence and higher levels of academic achievement.

Please peruse the project plans below, and look at the Resources for Participants.

Gainesville State College is setting clear expectations for incoming and current students and providing engrossing learning experiences to create an atmosphere of student success and engaged learning. The institution will move toward these goals by building a First-Year Experience program and laying the foundation for faculty development in student engagement practices. Goals for each program are grounded in the LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes and emphasize the creation and use of high-impact practices that are well-developed, implemented, and assessed. The FYE program will be interdisciplinary and a part of the core curriculum, intent on helping students understand the relevance of their courses to each other and on developing personally and socially. The FYE and Roadmap-supported faculty development learning outcomes will focus on critical thinking, academic and social responsibility, and intercultural perspectives. Information literacy and integrative learning are also important areas of our comprehensive program.

GSC has always been a proponent of enriching the academic experience for students and faculty; the foundations of its work within Roadmap are multi-layered. GSC has data from CCSSE—2005, 2008, and 2011—that provide a snapshot of its students, their needs, and their reflections around engagement. In addition, the institution completed the Foundations of Excellence self-study (2007-2008) that identified areas of need for first-year students. Using these data sources, as well as the data garnered from the general education assessments, GSC’s Roadmap Project will help to integrate several programs already in place, such as faculty development in collaboration with the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Leadership; Service Learning and Learning Communities; the General Education Assessment program, which includes critical thinking as an outcome assessed across several courses; or programs in development including, but not limited to, the upcoming Quality Enhancement Plan for SACS reaccreditation.

To learn more about the Roadmap Project at Gainesville State College, see its campus action plan developed at the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Georgia Perimeter College is dedicated to creating a dynamic and creative roadmap that engages students to become both active learners and active citizens in a global society. In this capacity, GPC has implemented multiple early intervention and support strategies to place students on this roadmap to success. These strategies encompass a general plan for advising, retention, completion and transfer as well as specific programs to meet the needs of students for whom a “one-size-fits-all” approach is not appropriate. Specifically, our Transfer Admission Guarantee (TAG), Early Alert, and New Student Orientation Programs will provide insight to successful strategies in the areas of student service. Academically, GPC is committed to building on and improving our existing strengths in high-impact programs (HIPs) through experiential education, with emphasis on (1) the pedagogy of service learning, and (2) opportunities for students to engage with “green” technologies and sustainability.

GPC’s Roadmap to student success will address the following areas that impact student success at our institute:

• First Year Experiences
• Service Leaning and sustainability
• Learning Communities
• A pilot study program that institutes a number of the HIPs including those listed above to a specific cohort population.

For information about the first-year experience, service learning, and learning communities, see the Roadmap Action Plan.

Pilot Study

Roadmap Pilot Program: A primary question to address: What are the effects of HIPs on measures of student success and persistence at GPC. To this end the Roadmap project will include a pilot study project designed to address the following questions: (1) How do HIPs effect student grades and GPA? (2) Do HIPs increase persistence rates? (3) Do HIPs increase measures of critical and creative thinking? (4) Do HIPs, and specifically Service Learning effect student’s knowledge of social responsibility and community engagement? (5) What are the effects of HIPs on written & oral communications skills? (6) Does the GPC student Roadmap project increase teamwork and problem solving? (7) Do students exposed to HIPs have increased interaction with faculty and peers?

Essential Learning Outcomes & Assessments: The Student Roadmap Pilot study will focus on a select cohort to assess how a specifically tailored student educational plan including an FYE, service learning, and learning communities effects specific learning outcomes including critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, teamwork and problem solving, civic knowledge and engagement, and measure of academic success including GPA and academic persistence. The study will utilize a mixed methods strategy that includes both quantitative statistical analysis, and qualitative measures and focus group reports.

Upwards of 90 percent of entering freshmen at Hostos Community College have at least one developmental/remedial need. In order to move on to college-level courses, students must pass the CUNY skills tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. Unfortunately, large numbers of students do not pass both the reading and writing tests and drop out of college. In addition, upwards of 80 percent of Hostos’ entering freshmen are first generation students in college and, therefore, have little or no knowledge of college expectations. The Hostos action plan is to review and revise the curriculum in the developmental courses so that students will attain the skills necessary to pass these tests and persist in their studies, as well as help the students make the transition to college.

A College Seminar will be developed to reinforce the writing and reading proficiencies needed to pass the CUNY exams, while at the same time preparing students for the academic and intellectual demands of college life. The College Seminar would be taken by students in developmental reading and writing courses. Students enrolled in these developmental courses will be registered in a blocked schedule that would be linked with the College Seminar. The entire experience will be called the ‘Semester of Success’ (SOS)!

The content/pedagogy would include a range of High Impact Practices (HIP). The specific curriculum for the College Seminar will be determined by faculty, as well as a review of the needs of students. Among the high impact practices being proposed for the College Seminar are: first-year seminar, learning communities, writing intensive activities, and integrated approaches to the curriculum. The College Seminar, itself, will be an inter-disciplinary thematically based credit-bearing course, taught by faculty, representing a variety of disciplines. Its content will be reinforced and reflected in the content of developmental courses. The College Seminar will also create the opportunities for students to engage in meaningful reading and writing activities. The College Seminar will be uniquely designed to meet our students’ needs, providing practices that develop both intellectual and practical academic competencies.

Also, the College Seminar will include students who will assist within the Seminar. These peer mentors would be available to assist with a wide range of areas, including writing, reading, tech issues, library research, information literacy, etc.

Recognizing the fact that Hostos has many students that enter at the lower and intermediate levels of ESL and would not be linguistically prepared to participate in the College Seminar, Hostos is also proposing a supplementary first-year model tailored to their needs. For ESL students in their first or second term, the College would create an ‘Academic Seminar’ that would engage the ESL students, including helping to make them part of the overall college community. The Academic Seminar is envisioned to be part of their course, as required modules, providing students with additional support such as specialized tutoring, study skills, library usage, available college resources, extra-curricular activities, etc.

In succeeding semesters, based on the results of the assessments, Hostos will expand the SOS program, including the College Seminar, to provide the experience to entering freshmen who are placed in Freshman Composition (i.e., who do not require developmental work in reading and/or writing).

Lane Community College is committed to a college-wide focus on two new Lane Strategic Directions “Optimal Student Preparation, Progression and Completion" and “Liberal Education.” These Strategic Directions were approved by the College Council and Lane’s Board of Education spanning 2010 to 2015. Faculty and staff across the college will have opportunities to advance their learning and research in these areas in a coordinated and focused manner.

A major and on-going project guiding the college’s work on these strategic directions is Lane’s Title III Strengthening Institutions project—Engaging Students. Lane is midway through this five-year project, the focus of which has been to improve persistence and completion through multiple, early interventions in a first-year experience. The Roadmap Project complements Engaging Students by further developing Lane’s commitment to quality progression and completion and a liberal education for all students by helping them to understand their progress. The work of the Roadmap project customizes the Lane Guide to Personal Success, what we are calling the Lane GPS, to meet the needs of students in identifying and documenting success on their personal journeys.

A natural springboard for the projects has been Lane’s Student Success Study Series launched in Winter 2011, bringing together more than 50 leads of the college committees and councils to create an integrated understanding of how the institution can best function. The act of engaging this large group of institutional leaders with the effort of explicitly mapping interconnections, systems, and relationships, has the potential to make them better “tour guides” by helping them understand our interconnected landscape, and can reveal strengths, weaknesses, and barriers to student success.

From the suggestions of the various teams and committees in the Student Success Study Series, the Roadmap Team has identified several key strategies for the college to pursue to provide Lane students with tools to know where they are and how they are doing on their roadmap to personal success.

ROADMAP PROJECT GOALS

Project Goals:

1. To develop an implementation plan for Lane’s institutional map and the Lane Guide to Personal Success (GPS)
2. To develop the specific components of the institutional maps
3. To infuse professional development for faculty and staff

1. Core learning outcomes:
   • Revise current learning outcomes that cut across the college
   • Make outcomes visible to students, faculty, and staff
   • Provide faculty and staff with knowledge, skills, and strategies to help students meet the outcomes.
2. High-Impact Practices:
   • Assist faculty, staff and students in identifying, supporting, and implementing high-impact practices to increase student success.
3. Degree progression & completion:
   • Select and implement a degree audit system
   • Add online Advising and mandatory orientation
For more information on these project goals, see Lane’s Action Plan from the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Miami Dade College currently uses an electronic academic progress alert system as a proactive means to keep students informed of their progress at key points in a term. Roadmap to Completion endeavors to create a more robust and intrusive intervention that not only utilizes the electronic alert system, but also complements it by engaging Student Services (Advising) in providing intrusive intake and advising to students who are not progressing in any given course. Faculty will make their entries in the alert system, generating reports that will be received by Advising for each student who is not making adequate progress. Advising will utilize a combination of technology and in-person communication to help students develop strategies and access campus resources to address impediments. For example, the development of an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) may include referral for tutoring, engagement in service learning, and participation in internships as well as student organizations. Roadmap to Completion introduces and reinforces the College’s student learning outcomes.

Summary of Program Goals

• Using IR data, build awareness, across student affairs and academic affairs, of the loss in momentum to degree completion that occurs when students are not making satisfactory progress.
• Engage academic affairs (faculty) and student services (advising) in an integrated, intrusive approach to identifying students whose in-course performance is unsatisfactory and subsequently, developmental advising and referral to specific student support services.
• Identify and proactively target an area for improvement (College Prep Reading students) by building upon an existing practice (progress alerts) by developing an enhanced HIP (technology enhancement to progress alerts, interface between faculty and advisors, advising, referral to supplemental student support services)
• Measure the Roadmap project’s progress.

Middlesex Community College began the Roadmap Project aiming to develop and implement freshman seminars as a path towards student achievement of one of the six Institutional Student Learning Outcomes: Personal and Professional Development. Embedded within the project plan was the eventual use of student eportfolios in these seminars as a tool for students to use to document their growth as college students/learners/emerging professionals.

Shortly after the Roadmap Project plan was developed, Massachusetts invited state universities, colleges and community colleges to apply for Vision Project funding to advance one or more aspects of the Vision Project goals. MCC applied for funding to develop and implement a set of one-credit courses built around high-impact practices, linked to Gen Ed courses. Freshman seminars were one of the one-credit high-impact courses proposed. This Vision Project proposal was fully funded, allowing MCC quickly to implement and scale the original Roadmap freshman seminar model up to a much broader reach than would have otherwise been the case.

The MCC Roadmap team will now use the Roadmap funding to develop the eportfolio model that will be piloted in freshman seminars (and other interested courses) in Fall 12. Students’ eportfolio use in Freshman Seminar will be built around students’ self assessment of their ongoing development of the Institutional Student Learning Outcomes. The team is very interested in and impressed by Salt Lake Community College’s eportfolio model, and MCC is currently experimenting with the use of one of SLCC's supported software platforms, weebly.com. MCC will be building its eportfolio template from Fall 2011 to Spring 2012, seeking input from Freshman Seminar instructors during that spring semester as they pilot the first 12 sections of the Freshman Seminar. The plan is to use the Roadmap funding in Spring and Summer 2012 to pay for professional development, including perhaps either initiating a visit to Salt Lake or bringing some team members from SLCC to Middlesex. MCC is also interested in integrating some aspects of Pace University’s eportfolio model into this new structure; some funding may go toward learning more from them.

The Mt. San Antonio College (Mt. SAC) Roadmap team is evaluating the college’s existing programs and services that are designed to promote student success, primarily within basic skills units. Mt. SAC plans to identify sequential types of programs and activities that have proven to be successful and that affect large numbers of students. Incorporating those programs and activities, they are designing a digital Roadmap to Success for students. The Roadmap will be discussed with focus groups composed of faculty, staff, students and managers. It will guide students along a route marked by success milestones, beginning when a student enters college and continuing to the final goal of earning a degree or certificate or transfer to a four-year institution. The design of the digital map will embed information particular to different populations of students, across varying needs and abilities. The Roadmap team plans to evaluate and strengthen existing interventions and strategies as well as develop new strategies and interventions, as needed.

To learn more about the Roadmap Project at Mt. SAC, see its campus action plan developed at the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Northern Virginia Community College will focus on improved advising about general education, especially for transfer students, and real assessment of general education. Indicators will include higher graduation rates, improved transfer success, more General Education certificate completers, revised degree requirements in General Education, and improved learning outcomes. A new Council for General Education has been formed to provide leadership for the Roadmap Project. Faculty workshops, web-based resources, and outreach to a wide range of committees will be used to identify and implement changes. In particular, we will work with program faculty to review degree requirements to see if general education requirements can or should be adjusted. Two high-impact practices in particular—the systematic use of Honors courses and experiences and the expanded use of experiential learning—will be strengthened across the six campuses.

To learn more about the Roadmap Project at NOVA, see its campus action plan developed at the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Prince George’s Community College (PGCC) is establishing a Road to Success initiative by identifying and studying pathways of experiences designed to support students. This initiative depends on careful use of data on academic progress. Data can be shared with faculty mentors, advisors, support services, and the student so that all are well informed of an individual student’s progress. Progress data includes academic performance and evidence of learning outcomes as well as evidence of achievement outside the classroom (e.g., tutoring and mentoring sessions). Ultimately a complete set of data is created, which will provide a much clearer view of the experiences of students and will identify elements of those experiences that support students and help them to attain their academic goals.

The Road to Success is integrated into PGCC’s larger campus-wide initiative Envision Success and the campus Achieving the Dream project. Envision Success is both the institutional priority and the completion agenda for PGCC, aiming to ensure that students complete degrees, certificates, and preparation courses for certifications and licensures. It addresses three major components—time to completion, choice of program, and structure of program—while emphasizing quality, rigor, and relevance. PGCC intends to coordinate and link a number of initiatives to foster an environment of broad engagement in learning for student success.

Inside of the classroom, the Roadmap project is supporting the assessment process by ensuring that direct measurement of student performance occurs, with a particular focus on the general education Core Learning Outcomes (CLOs). As this data flows into a centralized repository, it is imperative that other factors including the many activities that occur outside of classroom and which often further enrich a student’s understanding the CLOs are regularly recorded. Thus, the Roadmap team is engaged in identifying existing programs which support students and working to align those offerings with the CLOs. In addition to these measurements, other checkpoints have been indicated along the Road to Success at which time the student will receive specific support and/or encouragement.

With these ideas in mind, the Roadmap team identified a “Road to Success” for our students, that involves four major “checkpoints” (stars on Figure 1) aimed at celebrating each student’s accomplishments and focusing the student on the steps ahead.

Entry

The first checkpoint is Entry. At entry, students experience an intake designed to acculturate the student to the PGCC environment. This is done through SOAR, a First Year Experience, and identifying the means by which someone (e.g., mentor, advisor, etc.) is assigned to the student, such that the student can rely upon this PGCC employee for answers and support. Additionally, since approximately 80% of PGCC students enter the college needing some developmental coursework, the Roadmap Project is particularly focused on supporting the needs of these students. The Roadmap team is working with Student Services and the Division of Learning Foundations to measure the impact of specific support offerings on students’ English, reading, writing, and mathematic abilities.

Completing Developmental

Students who complete the developmental sequence have persevered over a significant hurdle in their educational success and significantly increased their likelihood to obtain an academic credential. For this reason, it is important to celebrate this accomplishment through ceremony and letters recognizing the student’s accomplishment. The Roadmap team is establishing a ceremony to recognize those students who have completed their developmental coursework, which also serves as a welcome to the credit English and Mathematics courses. In addition to celebrating this accomplishment, the Roadmap team is focused on having students engage a career advisor at this check-point to ensure that students who have completed their developmental courses are on the right path based on the student’s academic goals.

30-Hours / Certificate

The next check-point along the path to success is to ensure that the student receives contact at approximately 30 hours or at the completion of a certificate. The goal of this contact is to require students to meet with an advisor/mentor to review the student’s record and ensure that the student is on target and understands his/her progress. The Roadmap team is working with Student Services and Academic Affairs to ensure that a regular check occurs, and that the data from the visits are recorded.

Degree

The celebration of degree attainment is already a regular part of the culture at PGCC. The Roadmap team’s focus is to ensure that students are informed about the process as they approach graduation and are informed about the benefits of completing as compared to transferring before completing the degree. The Roadmap team is particularly focused on ensuring that all students who are within 15 hours of completing their degree requirements are informed about the graduation process and completing the application for degree.

The goal of the Roadmap Team is to create a clear path that offers students continuous and appropriate levels of support. Along this path, the students’ progress and experiences can be measured to ensure that all students stay on the path to success. Once fully implemented, this path will become a direct way of transforming our students as they attain their academic goals.

Queensborough Community College has already developed the Freshman Academies Initiative to provide enhanced student support services and to deliver at least two of five available high-impact classroom strategies within the first 30 credits. The initiative’s assessment protocol utilizes surveys and reports in addition to rubrics measuring general education student learning outcomes in high-impact classrooms. Interdisciplinary faculty cohorts implement the LEAP VALUE rubrics to demonstrate general education outcomes in the high-impact classrooms.

The Freshman Academies Initiative at Queensborough Community College represents a scaled up, cross-cutting strategy with multiple interventions. The College’s strategic plan has adopted the Roadmap team’s goals to deepen high-impact strategies through more attention to innovation and high-impact practices in remedial classes, providing multiple high-impact experiences in cornerstone courses, and to target undergraduate research and common intellectual experiences within the first year of study. The Roadmap team is exploring ways to better identify and track high-impact classroom experiences to ensure that the Freshman Academy Assessment Protocol is correctly identifying student experience within the Freshman Academies.

To learn more about the Roadmap Project at QCC, see its campus action plan developed at the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Salt Lake Community College has developed a Roadmap Action Plan that operates on two levels. Most broadly, it promotes learning outcomes, strengthens our important College Essentials course, and brings selected high-impact practices to more students at SLCC. Specifically, the Action Plan envisions SLCC as the first community college in the nation that intentionally marries the following three interventions:

• a Math Emporium for underprepared students
• a College Essentials course focused on institutional learning outcomes, and
• Student electronic portfolios

Following the letter and the spirit of the Roadmap project, we believe that our Action Plan ties together seemingly different interventions in a positively synergistic way. Imagine approximately 600 students who test into Developmental Math after the implementation of this Action Plan: they enter the Math Emporium where they receive a mix of computer-based and professional instruction from a faculty member, and where they can progress as quickly as they are able through the modularized curriculum. At the same time, they enroll in LE 1020 (Essentials of College Study) early in their college career—exactly when we want them to learn the skills and behaviors that will best serve them throughout their time in higher education. Moreover, they get proper grounding in the ePortfolio technology and reflective practice that they will use in all their other General Education courses and possibly in their major as well. Our Action Plan results in an accelerated pathway full of achievable mini-goals for these first-year students, rather than a slowed-down pathway that mitigates against student persistence and success.

Beyond the specific target of students entering the Math Emporium, the Action Plan moves SLCC forward in broader ways as well. For instance, while most colleges and universities have learning outcomes, the AAC&U is reporting that most students are not aware of those learning outcomes. How, one might ask, can we expect our students to intentionally fulfill learning outcomes about which they are ignorant? Our plan addresses that problem by making sure SLCC’s college-wide learning outcomes are front-and-center in our college community. Further, faculty, student services staff, and administrators at SLCC have really not had sustained conversations about high-impact practices in higher education and how best to implement them broadly across the institution. By focusing on three of these practices—ePortfolios as a common intellectual experience, learning communities, and LE 1020 as part of a First Year Experience—our plan jump-starts this conversation and gives us a record of success upon which to build as we turn to other high-impact practices.

For more information on this project, see SLCC's Action Plan from the 2011 Institute on High-Impact Practices and Student Success.

Tidewater Community College is currently engaged in mapping general education courses in response to the Virginia Community College System mandate that each college develop learning outcomes that clarify each student’s achievement at the course level. In this process, there is a need to develop strategies to enhance the student’s experience, success, and subsequent transfer.

There are three components to the Roadmap Project at TCC:

1. Faculty Development: We are already in this phase and will continue to develop learning outcomes that align with the LEAP and VCCS outcomes. Faculty will also be trained on intrusive advising strategies and HIP strategies that can be integrated into their courses.
2. Freshman Experience (a three credit course): Students are exposed to the idea of a liberal education, and instructors address students' interests as faculty advisors. Faculty advising includes choosing the courses that are most likely to match their area(s) of interest.
3. Infusing HIPs: Students take courses in which HIPs are infused, helping them to connect the dots to why certain courses outside of their initial interest area are important. Students must demonstrate an understanding of why taking a high-impact course has helped them develop a knowledge of the broader world.

The goal of the project is to engage students systematically in “connecting the dots” between general education, learning outcomes, and the transition to the baccalaureate degree or to the workforce by:

1. Strengthening the current strategies in place
2. More effectively aligning the curriculum, learning outcomes, and assessment measures
3. Establishing a culture of intrusive “Advising as Teaching”