Making an Online Summer Bridge Program High Touch

Abstract

Making an Online Summer Bridge Program High Touch Melissa Eblen-Zayas (bio) and Janet Russell (bio) Summer bridge programs are designed to ease the transition to college by providing students with academic skills and social resources during the summer between high school graduation and college. Research shows that bridge programs are potentially effective at increasing retention and academic success of at-risk students by providing an early orientation to the college experience and connecting these students with each other and the community (Thayer, 2000; Institute of Education Sciences, 2016); however, bridge programs can be expensive for institutions to operate, and the students who might benefit most from participation may not be able to commit to being on campus full-time during the summer. We developed a hybrid program to achieve many of the goals of a traditional summer bridge program, but with a flexible implementation that allowed students to remain at home to meet employment or family obligations. The 6-week summer portion of the program was entirely online, followed by on-campus, face-to-face weekly course meetings in the 10-week fall term. Students earned 6 credits for completion of the entire (summer and fall) program (typical courses at our institution carry 6 credits), and there was no cost to students to participate. For our residential, small liberal arts college, a bridge course that opened with a completely online portion was paradoxical—How do you create a high-touch, online program that captures key elements of what is a mostly residential and face-to-face experience for students? We had two main goals for the design and implementation of the 6-week summer online portion of the program: for participating students (a) to review and strengthen the quantitative skills seen in high school math classes, and (b) to connect with the college community before arriving on campus in the fall. As these goals suggest, this program blended elements of academic affairs and student affairs to create a rich learning experience built on research-based suggestions for supporting first-generation students (Pascarella, Pierson, Wolniak, & Terenzini, 2004), although the program was not limited to first-generation students. GROUNDING OUR PROGRAM IN THE LITERATURE The academic focus of this program was strengthening and reviewing quantitative skills. Research has shown that there are large disparities in the math preparation of students that can be traced back to early [End Page 104] educational periods that impact whether students are well-positioned for 2-year or 4-year college experiences (Lee, 2012), and for some demographic groups, college enhances quantitative literacy disparities (Baer, Cook, & Baldi, 2006). Even at selective liberal arts colleges similar to ours, there are significant retention and achievement gaps for students in quantitative fields (Brown, Coffey, Rachford, & Sambolín, 2017). Every student at our institution is required to complete three courses that include a quantitative reasoning exploration component; yet students’ high school preparation in quantitative topics up through precalculus varies immensely, and the college offers no remedial courses in math or quantitative reasoning. Because this program did not target students with particular academic interests (e.g., potential STEM majors), our goal was to review quantitative skills and also showcase the relevance of these skills to a variety of disciplines and career paths. First-generation college students are often unaware of the range of possible curricular and career options, but they benefit from explicit discussion of the possibilities (Parks-Yancy, 2012; Tate et al., 2015). Students were invited to participate based on ACT and SAT math scores that suggested they could benefit from quantitative skills review. Over 100 students were invited to apply, approximately 30–40 students followed through with an application, and we selected 20 students to participate, primarily based on a quantitative skills assessment and how students’ areas of needed improvement matched with the quantitative topics addressed by the program. The program topics were chosen based on conversations with faculty members in multiple disciplines, as well as assessments of students’ quantitative skills from previous years. We did not target particular demographic groups in our invitation or in our selection process, but the percentage of students eligible for U.S. Department of Education TRIO Student Services Support who participated in the...