Forum on Student Success, February 10, 2017

Please join us for an Academic Senate forum addressing issues related to student success. The forum is scheduled for Friday, February 10th, 2:30 pm-4:30 pm, in the Stevenson Event Center and will take the place of the Academic Senate Meeting originally scheduled for this date.

The purpose of this forum is to inform and consult with the faculty about new campus initiatives, including various methods of data collection, possible applications for such analytics, and recent HSI grants that seek to improve all student success. The forum will consist of three short presentations with Q&A throughout.

Faculty input is critical at this stage, particularly given the diversity of perspectives and philosophies concerning the use of metrics in addressing issues of student success. We hope that faculty and departmental staff working with the undergraduate curricula will ask questions, offer feedback, and contribute to the development of possible interventions based on any metrics we generate through the different systems currently being developed and/or implemented. 

Panelists and short summaries of their topics:

1. VPSS Jaye Padgett - Student Success Collaborative Campus (SSC Campus)
VPSS Padgett will describe an enterprise system for student success, called SSC Campus (soon to be called "Slug Success") that the Division of Student Success is implementing. The system is designed to support coordination of advising, case management, appointment making, alerts about students at risk in key courses or at risk of not qualifying for the major, and predictive analytics, which is the use of historical student information system data to gauge the risk of current students not graduating in their major. The SSC Campus team is seeking feedback on the use of some of this functionality, especially about the use and implications of predictive analytics for student success.

2. CEP Chair John Tamkun - Use of Data Analysis and Visualization to Promote Student Success

Chair Tamkun will present the results of a longitudinal study of undergraduates interested in the life sciences and engineering who entered UCSC as freshmen in the fall of 2012. He will describe the academic challenges faced by these students, including factors affecting their retention and timely graduation, with a focus on traditionally underrepresented groups in STEM fields. The lessons learned from this study will be discussed in the context of the emerging field of predictive analytics.

3. Professor Juan Poblete and AVP Pablo Reguerin - HSI Grants and Programming
Professor Poblete and AVP Reguerin will share findings based on the work that the UCSC Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) team (composed of staff, administrators and faculty)has conducted over the past several years. Having identified preparatory Math and Writing education, sense of belonging, and advising as four key areas, the HSI team set out to gather the data to quantify and understand the true nature and dimensions of our issues in each area. Professor Poblete and AVP Reguerin will present the HSI team’s equity based conceptual and data gathering approach, now being implemented at UCSC with the help of three U.S. Department of Education Title V HSI grant awards totaling 9.3 million dollars over the next five years.