Starfish, and You: Supporting EMU Students

One thing about the Holman Success Center: we assess everything. Everything. We even assess our assessments. Of course, we can assess until we're blue in the face, but it won't matter unless we act on those assessments.

Back in 2017, EMU began implementing the early-alert tool, Starfish, in a very limited way. I've been fortunate enough to work with this tool as an instructor and Academic Success Coach for several years now, and have just recently assumed the tenant admin duties upon Raechel Epinoza's departure from the university. It has been fascinating to be involved in the back end and witness the coordination and development first-hand. Starfish is like a mythical creature with multiple arms, each reaching a hand out to every student on this campus and offering our collective engagement, support, and feedback.

Or, you know, a web-based implement providing holistic student services.

Goals and Metrics

So, you thought this post was going to be about assessment. Oh, it is. I can already share with you some of our baseline metrics.

For Winter 2021, 10,017 surveys went out to instructors - one each at the 3rd, 6th, and 11th weeks, resulting in 15,051 tracking items. Even better, the items raised on these surveys were overwhelmingly positive: nearly 70% were kudos [see figure 1]! That's more than 10,000 individual pieces of positive and motivating instructor feedback hitting our students' email inboxes.

But what about the constructive feedback? The remaining 4,594 tracking items were flags of either "Attendance Concern," "At Risk of Failing," "Missing/Late Assignments," "Low or No Online Participation," "Cannot Pass," and "Never Attended." Academic Advisors and Holman Success Coaches conducted student outreach on three of these types of flags (2,052), resulting in 570 successful student contacts and conversations.

"But Tracey," you're saying, "these are just numbers. You're not assessing; you're just counting." That's fair, but our next step will be evaluating the effectiveness of instructor feedback. With all other factors being equal, what effect do kudos have on students' success in the classroom? Do students who respond to an "At Risk of Failing" flag ultimately pass the course in greater numbers than those who don't respond? We will have a lot of attributes to control for, so those data might take a while longer.

Opportunities

The ability to connect with groups of students by attribute is especially exciting to me. As an example, just moments ago, I was able to filter for all undergraduate students enrolled in a section of EXSC 201 and 202. Using this filter, I sent a brief message to all these students advertising new tutoring days and times for these courses.

Earlier today, I created a referral for one student to the Disability Resource Center, referred another student to their appropriate academic advising office, and created kudos for all of our returning EMU Edge students.

Academic advisors can pull up a list of students on their caseloads who have already withdrawn from a course in the current term, thus providing an opportunity for outreach and connection to those students who may be experiencing personal difficulties that affect their academic work.

In the Holman Success Center, we piloted the use of a personalized Success Plan for Edge students in the Fall 2021 semester. Based on student and coach feedback, we've begun creating success plans for all the students with whom we work as Success Coaches. UACDC has also been using success plans for reinstated students, providing accessible information to all support staff on individual student goals and requirements. I'm also in discussions with Sara Bamrick, Engagement and Activities Coordinator for Campus Life, on the potential use of the Success Plan tool in Starfish for a co-curricular map for students.

Future Plans

I've already had the opportunity to host training workshops for instructors and staff members on using Starfish, including best practices and the technical details of setting up appointment scheduling, viewing students by attribute, and documenting student outreach. More training sessions are being added to the calendar for early March. Our ultimate goal, on the training side of things, is to ensure that every faculty advisor and student-facing staff member is comfortable using the tool.

The Starfish Core Team is looking at more short-term goals now, such as increasing our survey completion rate up to the 40% range. For us to reach that goal, we need faculty help. It only takes a few moments to respond to each of the three Progress Surveys we send throughout the term. When you check "Low or No Online Participation" for one of your students, you are quite literally raising a flag that will catch the attention of a success coach and/or academic advisor, as well as coordinators for any programs in which the student may be participating.

While it may take a village to raise a child, we're relying on a Starfish to help us guide and support that same child to a college degree.