Abstract
Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering learners. First-year students are expected to be self-directed in their learning, yet may have neither been challenged nor experienced negative consequences for a lack of perseverance. Academic skills professionals can be partners with teaching faculty in student success by helping to build transferable learning skills, especially for high-fail introductory courses. In this paper, I report on supplementary workshops developed to target fundamental skills with course-specific examples. This partnership included incentivizing academic support with both carrots and sticks; instructors in introductory biology strongly urged students receiving D grades or below on the first test to approach Student Services for support, while sociology faculty incorporated workshop attendance into the introductory course with participation grades. Following such incentivizing of learning skills, workshop attendance increased by 45%. In both courses, first test scores and high school averages for students attending workshops did not differ from students not attending workshops. However, students who attended learning skills workshops had significantly higher course grades, persistence, sessional grade point averages (GPAs), and cumulative GPAs than students not attending workshops. Controlling for high school average, each learning skills workshop attended was associated with a 0.11 to 0.27 increase in sessional GPA on a 4.3 point scale.
Highlights
Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering learners
This paper describes a partnership between Student Services and faculty teaching highfail introductory courses at a small primarily undergraduate university on the Prairies
Introductory Sociology attend workshops with those who did attend learning skills, and randomly selected for two groups of 48 students. Persistence measures on these two groups showed that more students who attended at least one learning skills workshop continued into the year of studies (81%) than those not using this form of academic support (58%), χ2(1, N = 96) = 5.978, p =
Summary
Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering learners. I report on supplementary workshops developed to target fundamental skills with course-specific examples This partnership included incentivizing academic support with both carrots and sticks; instructors in introductory biology strongly urged students receiving D grades or below on the first test to approach Student Services for support, while sociology faculty incorporated workshop attendance into the introductory course with participation grades. Following such incentivizing of learning skills, workshop attendance increased by 45%. Council of Canada, 2014, p. 18) guidelines for program evaluation activities used for improvement purposes (Article 2.5)
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