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To boost student retention and student success, institutions across the country have identified decentralized data collection and siloed resources as areas for improvement. Data can be employed to identify trends, gaps, and areas of opportunity, and it can also provide incredibly powerful predictive analytics—but institutions must have a centralized channel for data to harness its power.
At the University of Wisconsin-Superior, institutional data points are pivotal to student success efforts, as is the inclusion of mentorship as a means of uncovering ways to connect with students in more meaningful and impactful ways. During a recent Mentor Collective webinar, UW-Superior’s Provost Dr. Maria Cuzzo and Megan Torkildson, Director of the Educational Success Center, shared the role that data captured from peer connections has played in their student retention strategy.
Read on for some key findings and takeaways from this conversation.
Rich, Granular Data
The more specific data institutions collect, the more effective they become at shaping student success solutions. Like many colleges and universities, UW-Superior leverages comprehensive reports from predictive analytics software – like EAB Navigate – that cross-reference a variety of reported academic and demographic information to sooner identify students more likely to need support. While informative and effective for broad sweeping efforts, the large, public institution found that combining the "big data" from Navigate with the student-sourced insights in the Mentor Collective Dashboard (captured from thousands of peer conversations) gave them a deeper understanding of the factors and barriers that impact student persistence. They in turn took these insights to further inform they queries in the Navigate platform, creating a reciprocal feedback loop that went beyond GPA and SAT scores.
"Because every student is different, creating a sense of belonging and support looks different for each individual. UW-Superior looks at data as a window into student purpose and the “why” that’s driving them towards graduation. Getting deeper into who the student is as a person, what they care about, and what makes them feel like they belong can’t be overlooked."
– Megan Torkildson, Director of the Educational Success Center
A No-Assumptions Approach
One of the most valuable data points from Mentor Collective’s dashboard is which students need more support from the university. Without data, the administrators, staff, and faculty are left with assumptions, not actionable information.
In the case of UW-Superior, the data revealed that while students of all backgrounds were participating in the mentorship program at optimistic rates, the students who were most active were categorized by Navigate as needing "low levels of support"; a surprising revelation for administrators who hadn't focused efforts on this group previously.
The data also showed that those low-support students retained at rates 12 percent higher than their peers who were also identified as low support but did not participate in the Mentor Collective program. Students identified as needing "high levels of support" also retained at rates higher than non-participants with the same classification; at rates 7 percent higher. “What really stuck out to us is that peer mentorship is working for a group of students we didn’t even intend it for in the first place,” says Torkildson.
The results yielded a renewed focus on sense of belonging and the ways it can affect student persistence irrespective of demographic background and academic preparation. As Torkildson noted, “Belonging should be cultivated among all students, each in their own ways.”
Identifying the Effects of Low Student Belonging
Measuring sense of belonging gives an institution valuable insights into how students feel about their experience and what opportunities they have to connect with their student population. UW-Superior uses the assessment tools from Mentor Collective to monitor sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy three times a year. Microsurveys are designed and scheduled per UW-Superior's strategy and ask students to rate themselves on a five-point scale. Question include, but are not limited to, how comfortable they feel at their school and with their studies, how supported they feel, if they feel able to succeed academically, and whether they feel like an important member of the school’s community.
“A lot of students don’t really feel connected to campus and even though we have student initiatives, clubs, and different things that can connect students, they are still not feeling that connection. If a student isn’t feeling connected to campus, that impacts so much for them.”
– Megan Torkildson, Director of the Educational Success Center
A lack of belonging can ultimately impact academic performance, and with a combination of predictive analytics and peer support that those flags can be raised and addressed early. The blend of data gives UW-Superior “an opportunity to transfer some of that academic support focus to the sense of belonging support focus.”
Peer mentoring can also be critical in shoring up potential gaps between students and the rest of the university community. While students sometimes won’t feel inclined to reach out to staff, they can feel more comfortable talking with peers. Systematic, intentional, and well-supported peer mentorship can become an important layer between student and staff, which translates to better utilization of available resources and ultimately increased success.
“Students aren’t always going to talk to us as faculty and stuff, so how can we leverage our mentors to be able to gain some of that information so we can support students?” says Torkildson.
Bag of Marbles vs. String of Pearls
Thinking about institutional strategy and the role that peer mentorship can play, Provost Dr. Maria Cuzzo sees meaningful peer connections as the connective tissue that can uplift other efforts and resources. Across higher education resource awareness among students is low, which can make even the best designed initiatives fall short.
Source: Driving Toward a Degree, Tyton Partners analysis
In many institutions, the resources and initiatives that support students are “siloed and separate so though they are great, they don’t weave or string together in a meaningful way,” says Cuzzo. She likens having disparate resources that don’t work as well as they could to having a box of marbles, which are individually beautiful, but not connected.
“We are actively working on a strategy that’s much more like a string of pearls. We’re thinking about it from a student’s journey through the collegiate experience and how these different venues, experts, programs can link together in a coherent way.”
– Dr. Maria Cuzzo, Provost
The data collected at UW-Superior isn’t viewed as just information; it’s insight that drives how students can be supported. By marrying the data collected through Mentor Collective's scalable peer mentorship model with institutional information and cross-referencing with their support levels and predictive analytics, students’ need for help can be identified and addressed more quickly. “Peer mentorship really provides support in multiples of these siloes of activity, and in fact it can form a bridge between some of these activities that we’re engaging in,” says Cuzzo.
Collect and Use Your Mentorship Data
Institutions have an ongoing stream of data flowing through them every single year. When tracked, collected, and assessed correctly, that data can solve problems, close gaps, and inform student support initiatives going forward. Ultimately, for UW-Superior, this data is helping inform their entire student success strategy going forward and creating touch points with students who would typically have a passive college experience. Through Navigate, they've identified new populations of students to offer mentorship as another option to support their goals.
Within Navigate, profiles of the students not retained were cross-referenced with students who had, reveal several differentiating factors including:
- First-year students who had not retained were more likely to be on Academic Probation/Suspension within the first semester
- First-year students who had retained were more likely to have an on-campus job in the first year
- First-year students who had not retained were slightly older on average and had significantly lower GPAs
While peer mentorship is not the only intervention required to encourage student persistence in the No Support Group, Dr. Cuzzo and Torkildson see it's value in fostering belonging and showing students what's possible at UW-Superior regardless of how they enter the institution. Through the university's partnership with Mentor Collective, they can scale an intentionally designed mentorship program and see its return on investment in real-time through the immediate interventions they make with students individually and the trends uncovered in aggregate.