• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Student Experience Project

Student Experience Project

  • About
  • Our Work
  • News
  • Resources
  • Contact Us

Blog

5 ways to contribute to student self-efficacy in your courses

March 3, 2022

During the Fall 2020 term, instructors in the SEP improved students’ overall experiences of their learning environments significantly. One aspect of the student experience, however, proved to be more challenging for instructors to move than others: student’s feelings of self-efficacy, or the extent to which an individual believes in their ability to do well on a specific task or in a specific domain (Bandura, 1997). 

Understanding how to support students’ feelings of self-efficacy is important because when students have developed self-efficacy in a course, they show greater motivation and better performance (Bandura & Locke, 2003). Past research has demonstrated the critical role of self-efficacy for these key outcomes in STEM domains and for groups who have been traditionally viewed as being less interested, confident, or successful in STEM (e.g., women; Pajares, 2005). While self-efficacy is important to attend to, it can also feel like one of the more difficult aspects of the student experience to support. That is because students’ feelings of self-efficacy are often informed by multiple factors outside of instructors’ control. For example, when students participating in SEP courses are asked to explain the way that they respond to self-efficacy questions in our surveys, they commonly cite performance in past courses, mental health challenges, and responsibilities outside of school as factors that contribute significantly to their feelings of self-efficacy in their current courses. With so many outside factors impacting students’ feelings of self-efficacy, it’s reasonable to wonder – how much can instructors really do?

Past research, and feedback from students in SEP participating courses indicates that while there are outside factors contributing to students’ self-efficacy, self-efficacy can still be fostered and bolstered within the classroom (Corbett & Hill, 2015; Dennehy & Dasgupta, 2017; Hill et al., 2010). In this blog post, we share 5 instructional practices that can positively impact students’ feelings of self-efficacy in their current courses, along with resources that instructors can use to incorporate these approaches into their teaching. 

Instructional practices that contribute to higher levels of self-efficacy in students’ current courses:

  1. Communicate care and belief in all students’ ability to succeed: One of the most common themes in student feedback about what positively impacts students’ feelings of self-efficacy is when they feel confident that their instructors believe that all students in the course are capable of learning and growing their abilities during the term. In other words, when students believe that their instructor has a growth mindset about students’ abilities, they are more likely to believe that they personally can be efficacious within that course. Instructors can take a number of steps to build growth mindset cultures in their courses, including using effective growth mindset messaging to establish expectations at the start of the term, emphasizing throughout the term that ability is developed over time by being responsive to to feedback and utilizing new strategies for learning, and by countering internalized fixed mindset beliefs at the end of the term. 
  2. Provide clear course content, expectations, and feedback: students tell us that when instructors have clear expectations, consistent policies, and provide actionable and timely feedback, even fast paced and heavy workload courses can feel more manageable. The SEP Syllabus Review and Policy Review guides support instructors in reviewing their course structure and messaging with an eye toward ensuring that course policies and practices support student learning and growth. Utilizing wise feedback framing statements and providing students opportunities to reflect on their learning through the use of assessment wrappers further support self-efficacy by helping to ensure that critical feedback is delivered in a way that engenders trust and promotes continued engagement and learning.
  3. Provide and normalize the use of resources for learning: There are many resources available on college campuses to support students through academic challenges, but even when those resources are known, students can be reluctant to use them because of the stigma felt when reaching out to utilize them. Instructors can help normalize the use of resources as a standard part of succeeding in college by promoting resources to support all students’ success in the syllabus or course website, and during in class remarks throughout the term.
  4. Highlight self-relevance and connect content to students’ sense of purpose: Research shows that when students see their coursework as relevant to their lives and connected to their sense of purpose, it increases students’ motivation to persist through challenges, which also boosts feelings of self-efficacy. Instructors can encourage students to develop a sense of self-relevance in their coursework by providing opportunities for students to connect their own interests and goals to their coursework.
  5. Highlight the accomplishments of others: students are more likely to believe that they, themselves, can do things to improve when they see others (and those like themselves) succeed. One way to do this is by highlighting role models that share students’ backgrounds and goals in course lectures (for examples, see the Acknowledging Diverse Identities in the Ensuring Classroom Identity Safety resource), or sharing how you (or others) have found a place within your discipline by sharing a Belonging Story.

 

Authors: 

  • Kathryn Boucher, PhD, Associate Professor, College of Applied Behavioral Sciences, University of Indianapolis, and Principal Investigator, College Transition Collaborative 
  • Krysti Ryan, PhD, Director of Research, College Transition Collaborative 

 

References: 

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company. 

Bandura, A., & Locke, E. A. (2003). Negative self-efficacy and goal effects revisited. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 87–99.

Corbett, C., & Hill, C. (2015). Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing. American Association of University Women. Washington, DC.

Dennehy, T. C., & Dasgupta, N. (2017). Female peer mentors early in college increase women’s positive academic experiences and retention in engineering. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(23), 5964-5969.

Hill, C., Corbett, C., & St. Rose, A. (2010). Why so Few?: Women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Washington, D.C.

Pajares, F. (2005). Gender Differences in Mathematics Self-Efficacy Beliefs. In A. M. Gallagher & J. C. Kaufman (Eds.), Gender differences in mathematics: An integrative psychological approach (pp. 294–315). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Blog

How Can Institutions of Higher Education Measure and Improve Their Students’ Experiences?

February 14, 2022

The last ten years have seen an explosion of interest in growth mindset and belonging among institutions of higher education. Since 2017, about 100 institutions have annually made use of free resources created by the College Transition Collaborative (CTC) and the Project for Education Research that Scales (PERTS), including the Growth Mindset for College Students program and the Social Belonging for College Students program. Despite the availability of free, easy-to-implement, scientifically validated programs for students, institutions still frequently approach PERTS and CTC in search of something else: measurement tools.

They are right to do so. Research has pointed to institutions’ critical role in creating culture and policies to help all students feel confident that they belong in college and that their institution believes in their potential. These factors can be important predictors of excellent and equitable outcomes (Murphy & Reeves, 2019; Canning et al., 2019). Programs to help students approach college with a growth mindset and clear beliefs about belonging — while valuable — are unlikely to help institutions change their cultural norms and practices and see more equitable outcomes (Murdock-Perreira, Boucher, Carter, & Murphy, 2019). It is unfair for the burden to be placed solely on students to “persevere” through conditions that actually send signals that they don’t belong. Systemic and sustainable change necessitates a structural approach. 

Institutional leaders understand that measurement is key to meaningful change. Without measurement, you can try all the evidence-based, psychologically attuned practices you want — and some of them might even work. But you’ll never know what was effective, or where. With institutional resources and bandwidth increasingly limited, it is more important than ever to understand the return on investment for any new initiative. And once the most effective practices are identified, data helps build a case to administrations about how and where to spread them. 

Likewise, measurement alone without a theory of change and aligned evidence-based change ideas can leave those leading systems change adrift. Determining how to change systems from scratch can be daunting and burdensome. And building buy-in for systems change without confidence in why the change is important or specificity in what the change will entail is usually a non-starter. A theory of change organizes the efforts of many diverse actors around a single definition of success, so that everyone is pointing in the same direction and with a shared set of measures and change ideas. (For free resources on developing theories of change and designing continuous improvement efforts, visit https://www.shift-results.com/online-learning/.) 

 

The SEP Approach

In the Student Experience Project (SEP), we co-designed a theory of change, which includes a shared and measurable aim, a theory for how to accomplish that aim, and measurements including longer-term academic outcomes as well as more frequent measures to assess student experience across multiple terms. This framework was designed collaboratively by leading social psychologists and continuous improvement experts, alongside teaching faculty and staff from diverse fields such as chemistry, mathematics, public health, biology, and the social sciences. The six universities in the SEP cohort used this framework over two years to continuously improve students’ experiences in their academic courses, while sharing data and learning to learn faster together. These institutions were able to reduce disparities in positive student experiences, which predicted gains in academic outcomes as well. (See Boucher et al., 2021.)

 

Measuring Experiences

While most institutions already track academic outcomes (e.g., DFW’s, persistence), few track student experiences systematically (we hope this will change). We developed a portfolio of shared measures to learn about student experience in depth and over time, as well as to support day-to-day improvement work with student experiences in classes. We adapted survey measures from research literature to provide evidence-based, actionable, and practical measures for busy instructors to use in their classes.

Evidence-based. We chose measures to comprehensively address the most important factors known from research to shape learning and achievement outcomes, including social belonging, institutional growth mindset, and self-efficacy, as well as lesser explored but equally important contributors to outcomes such as identity safety and trust in the fairness of institutional practices. We started with a list of several dozen constructs, all pulled from research literature showing firm links to academic outcomes. We whittled this list down as a community, based on (1) initial data analyses showing which constructs were most important at each institution, (2) which constructs were likely to be sensitive to change in the time-course of a semester based on previous research; and (3) which were most meaningful to institutional stakeholders. We arrived at a list of seventeen items, designed to provide a global assessment of the experiences that matter most to student learning, appropriate for repeat sampling.

Actionable. A measure’s unit of analysis must match its unit of action. Institutions commonly turn to large-scale climate surveys to measure student experiences. But while climate surveys can be useful as snapshots across departments or a whole campus, they rarely get data into the hands of the people who can actually improve students’ experiences in the classroom directly. In the SEP, our data had to be relevant and accessible to the people who would actually use it: in this case, instructional faculty and community of practice (CoP) facilitators. All measures use language that focuses students’ attention to their immediate context (“in this class…”), rather than their global college experience, because class experiences are within instructors’ spheres of influence. Instructors and CoP facilitators furthermore received data early enough in the semester to make changes: the Ascend program allowed CoPs to survey students and receive comprehensive data reports within a week’s time. Reports are delivered directly (and confidentially) to faculty, and include recommendations for practical, evidence-based approaches that instructors can try. This allowed instructors to be nimble and responsive to how students’ experiences were changing week-to-week, rather than waiting until the end of the semester — or longer — when the data are no longer directly actionable.

Practical. Finally, we knew that minimizing the time and resources needed for students to engage with the survey, and for faculty and administrators to understand the data, would be critical to ensure buy-in. Our seventeen-item survey was brief enough to be completed in under 10 minutes, and the Ascend program handled all the data collation, imputation, and summarization so that busy instructors could prioritize learning from data and improving their practice. 

 

Student Experiences are a “Global Health” Measure for Higher Education

The SEP student experience measures give educators a series of comprehensive yet straightforward snapshots of their students’ experiences throughout the semester. While this idea may be novel in higher education, we adapted lessons from a revolution occurring in medicine over the last 30 years. The field of medicine is working to move away from its sole reliance on clinical outcomes, to a more patient-centered approach that also incorporates patients’ own experience of their condition as indicators of overall health and well-being. The Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMIS) has helped enable this revolution by allowing diverse groups of clinicians to measure and improve patients’ quality of life using an industry-standard measurement framework (Forrest et al., 2014). Like student experience, facets of patient well being are diverse and include multiple constructs. The PROMIS measures provide both breakdown measurement by construct as well as a “global” measure to indicate overall wellbeing. 

We have adapted this concept for education, with strong conviction that an evidence-based, actionable, and practical framework of measuring students’ experiences in college can help revolutionize higher education in a similar way. The SEP measurement framework includes both individual constructs of student experience as well as a “global” measure which weaves them together into a singular measure, which the SEP Community named the Student Experience Index. We believe that it is important to broaden institutional focus beyond objective (and more distal) outcomes like DFWs and retention, to also include students’ own experiences of their learning which are clearly predictive of these outcomes. 

 

Resources and Next Steps

Going forward, we will continue to validate and develop the SEP measurement framework in order to further simplify it, maximize its value as a leading indicator of educational outcomes, and increase its practicality and scalability. Our goal is to create a measurement tool that is valuable to educators and can guide efforts to improve student experience and equitable outcomes across broad swaths of the higher education landscape. The measurements are currently available as a stand-alone instrument, or for use within the Ascend program. As we continue to refine and validate them, we will make updates available to the public as well.

We encourage those using these (or any) instruments to measure students’ experiences to be thoughtful about how the data are used. Data should be used as a tool for improvement by faculty to improve their practice, not wielded as an evaluative framework to judge or penalize faculty. These evaluative efforts often backfire as they do not result in authentic change, or belief about why the changes are important. Furthermore, evaluative measures such as course evaluations are known to increase bias against women and faculty of color. This risk is mitigated with the SEP measures because they focus attention on things like the pace of the course, the instructor’s flexibility, etc., rather than the instructor’s intellectual ability and competence (which trigger negative stereotypes about women and faculty of color). Nevertheless, the SEP measures are much more powerful when used in communities of practice for improvement. For this reason, the Ascend program keeps individual instructor data confidential — for faculty to share at their sole discretion. The power of using these in an improvement community (such as an improvement network or community of practice) is for faculty to share their data and exchange ideas for how to improve. We recommend a similar procedure for any institution looking to measure and improve student experiences.

 

A Student-Centered Revolution

While thoughtfulness is needed in this (or any) kind of higher education reform, the big picture is that institutions of higher education seem to be “awakening” to the importance of students’ experiences for their learning and achievement. One resource available to this revolution is the domain expertise of higher education practitioners. In fact, most data analysis techniques in wide use today were developed by such instructors. The capacity of higher education practitioners to use data for professional development is therefore high. We hope that more institutions will add frequent and consistent measurement as well as practices to learn directly from students and instructors. These snapshots of how the learning environment is being experienced speaks volumes of what is working, and what can be improved now.

 

Authors:

  • Sarah Gripshover, PhD, Director of Research, PERTS
  • Kathryn Boucher, PhD, Assistant Professor, College of Applied Behavioral Sciences, University of Indianapolis, and Principal Investigator, College Transition Collaborative
  • Krysti Ryan, PhD, Director of Research, College Transition Collaborative 
  • Karen Zeribi, Founder and Executive Director of Shift

 

Blog

Seven Ways to Ensure Your Early Alerts are Helpful, Not Harmful

January 24, 2022

Many students experience difficulty adjusting to college, which can make them question whether they belong and are capable of succeeding in college, as well as wonder how they are viewed by their school. While institutions offer many resources to support students when they experience academic difficulty, students may not be aware that these resources exist, or may be hesitant to utilize them if they believe that seeking help may be perceived negatively by their instructors or peers. Research demonstrates that when institutions communicate that academic difficulty is not uncommon, that seeking support is a key strategy for success rather than a sign of weakness, and that all students are capable of growing their abilities and succeeding in college, students are more likely to take advantage of campus resources to support their success (Canning et. al., 2019, Brady, Kroeper, Henderson, Ozier, et. al. (In Progress)). They are also less likely to feel shame and stress about experiencing academic difficulty (Brady et. al, 2018). 

Institutions have an opportunity to destigmatize academic difficulty and connect students with resources through their early warning or early alert practices. Early warning practices refer to a variety of processes that allow instructors to identify students who, based on course performance in the opening weeks of the term, may not be on track to receive a passing grade, and provide interventions that can help students improve their performance. Campuses participating in the Student Experience Project have been testing numerous changes to their early warning practices to support student belonging and communicate an institutional growth mindset. Institutions in the SEP have been primarily focused on ensuring that communications sent to students who have an early warning referral or alert from their instructors are attuned to students’ concerns, and thus directly and adaptively answer the questions on their mind. Campuses are investigating whether adjusting their messaging to normalize academic difficulty, destigmatize the use of academic support resources, and convey a growth mindset about student abilities will lead to more students engaging with academic support resources. 

Ensuring that the early alerts process is designed to support equitable student experience can take time and require input from a variety of stakeholders on campus. Here are a few steps that institutions can consider taking to set the foundation for effective early alerts:

  • Engage instructors in communicating about early alerts in a psychologically-attuned way: Instructors often submit early alerts for their students behind the scenes, but don’t always communicate with students about the purpose of this process. This can leave students feeling uncertain about what receiving an early alert means for their ability to succeed in the course, or embarrassed about the difficulty they are experiencing. To ensure that students perceive early alerts as helpful and supportive, rather than punitive, instructors can normalize these challenges and encourage students to seek support from the instructional team or other campus resources. The SEP team at University of Colorado – Denver worked closely with instructors to craft student-attuned statements about early alerts that they can share during class time and in the syllabus. For more tips on developing psychologically-attuned messages about early alerts, click here. 

 

  • Encourage deans and chairs to remind their faculty to participate in the early alerts process: Providing support and resources to students who need it requires high participation among faculty in the early alerts process. While instructors may get messages from central campus offices about participating in early alerts, academic leaders can reinforce this messaging in the context for success for their college or department. Tracking and publishing data on early alerts participation can provide opportunities for deans and chairs to encourage participation and celebrate success. 

 

  • Consider the name of your early alerts process: While “early alert” and “early warning” are commonly used terms among faculty, staff, and administrators across higher education, these phrases may cause unnecessary confusion or alarm for students. These terms may also lead campus stakeholders to approach the process solely as a notification system, rather than a more holistic opportunity to connect students with resources. CU Denver recently adopted the name “Early Action” for this process, to signal to students that they can take steps to utilize resources and succeed in their courses. 

 

  • Have the right messenger: Many campuses use automated systems to send early alert notification messages to students, allowing notifications to be distributed quickly and efficiently. Students may perceive these messages as cold and impersonal, particularly if they are coming from unfamiliar departments or email addresses. Several SEP campuses surveyed students about their perceptions of early alert notification emails; the SEP team at UNC Charlotte found that students much preferred and were more likely to take action on notifications that came from their instructors, advisors, or other familiar people. Investigate the settings in your early alerts software to understand what your personalization options might be.

 

  • Review any early alert template messages for stigmatizing language: Do a quick scan of any centralized early alerts notifications or email templates for language that might make students feel shame or stigma about receiving an early alert. Consider reframing or revising these statements to be more attuned to students’ experiences. For example, if your messages reference that students receiving early alerts should take action so they do not fail a course, changing the framing to emphasize early alerts as an opportunity to utilize resources designed to help them succeed would be more supportive of student experiences. 

 

  • Ensure students are being directed to resources that can help them: While you’re checking your messages, make sure that information about relevant campus resources, such as advising, tutoring, etc., are up-to-date and easily accessible to students. If your institution offers both in-person and virtual services, explicitly stating this in the early alert notification may help more students connect with these resources. 

 

  • Include student perspectives of experiences with early alerts: Studies of attuned academic probation letters show that including student stories into academic standing communications is beneficial for students (Brady et. al. (In Progress)). The University of North Carolina at Charlotte has several student stories on their Early Alerts website that demonstrate the kind of perspectives that can be highlighted in your early alert communications. For more information on the importance of including student stories, example student stories that you can adapt for your institutions, and suggestions for gathering perspectives from students, check out this free toolkit for improving communications about academic standing from the College Transition Collaborative. 

 

References:

Brady, S. T., Kroeper, K. M., Ozier, E. M., Henderson, A. G., Walton, G. M. & the College Transition Collaborative (2018). Academic probation and the role of notification letters [Research Brief]. Retrieved from http://collegetransitioncollaborative.org/content/sass_toolkit_researchbrief_final.pdf

Canning, E.A., Muenks, K., Green, D.J., & Murphy, M.C. (2019). STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes. Science Advances, 5(2).

 

Resources:

How You Say It Matters: A Toolkit for Improving Communications About Academic Standing by the College Transition Collaborative

 

AUTHOR: 

Samantha Levine, Associate Director, Coalition of Urban Serving Universities and APLU Office of Urban Initiatives 

Several members of the SEP Cohort contributed to this blog post. 

Blog

Returning to Campus: Four Resources for Supporting Student Belonging and Growth in Fall 2021

August 20, 2021

As the Fall 2021 term begins, the instructors that we work with in the Student Experience Project are expressing mixed feelings about the beginning of a new academic year. Many are excited to return to the classroom in person, ready to engage with students face-to-face after a year of predominantly virtual learning. Some are cautiously optimistic about the ability to safely maintain in-person learning over the term, while others have greater concerns about convening on campus as a new surge of coronavirus sweeps the nation amid inconsistent institutional policies regarding masking, social distancing, and vaccination. Nearly all instructors are concerned with how the lingering impacts of the last academic year, as well as COVID-19’s continuing rapid spread, will impact their students’ health, well-being, and learning this year. Concern is particularly high for students from socially marginalized and underserved groups (i.e. high financial stress students, students from structurally disadvantaged racial groups), who have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and are already not always provided with the  resources and support they need to reach their full potential in higher education. 

Last year, as colleges across the nation navigated the various challenges of supporting students through the pandemic, social unrest, and economic upheaval, they also collectively expanded their approaches for supporting the needs of diverse student populations. In the process, higher education learned a lot about how to meet our students where they are at, and work with them to create learning environments that can promote belonging, growth, and equity even in difficult circumstances. In the SEP, we designed and iteratively tested a library of practical tools and resources, to support instructors in creating classrooms that are welcoming for all students and provide the tools and resources that they need to thrive. Since the Fall 2020 term, these resources have been field-tested by more than 100 instructors in the SEP network. In this blog post, we are sharing four resources for pre-term or early term actions instructors can take to create courses that promote equity in students’ experiences and outcomes. 

Policy Review: Creating Student-Centered Course Policies: Course policies and practices that acknowledge and accommodate the lived experiences of diverse student populations can help close academic outcome gaps by helping to ensure that students’ engagement and performance is not negatively impacted by lack of access to resources or support, even when life circumstances present obstacles to education. When policies are attuned to students’ experiences and are written such that complying with them does not place an undue burden on students from particular identity groups, it helps to improve feelings of identity safety, promote student engagement, and increase social belonging, particularly among underrepresented or underserved student groups (McNair et. al., 2016; Murphy & Destin, 2016; McNair, Bensimon & Malcom-Piqueux, 2020). Developing student-centered course policies is likely to be one of the most effective things that instructors can do to drive more equitable academic outcomes in their courses. In this step-by-step guide, we provide suggestions and resources for reviewing current practices, and crafting or adapting course policies to more effectively promote equitable experiences and outcomes.

Establishing Expectations: A Growth Mindset Approach: When course expectations are conveyed in a way that communicates an institutional growth mindset about students’ abilities, it bolsters student engagement, and improves student learning and academic outcomes (Rattan et al., 2018; Canning et al., 2019). Using a growth mindset approach for establishing course expectations can also decrease students’ experiences of identity threat, and increase levels of trust among students who belong to groups that are targeted by negative stereotypes about their abilities (Murphy & Taylor, 2012). In this resource, we share our favorite approaches for communicating about academic standards and course expectations in a way that promotes student engagement, learning, and academic success.

Creating and Sharing a Belonging Story: When students understand that belonging concerns are normal and not a signal that they do not belong or that they lack academic potential, students are more likely to stay engaged, seek help when they need it, and persist through academic challenges (Murdock-Perriera et al., 2019; Murphy et. al., 2020). Hearing and reflecting on other peoples belonging stories can change students’ interpretations of challenges, and help them to persist through academic difficulties. Research with matriculating students finds that these stories are particularly impactful for reducing academic outcome gaps between racially minoritized and white students (Walton & Cohen, 2007; 2011), women and men in male-dominated engineering programs (Walton, et al., 2015) and first- and continuing-generation students (Murphy et al., 2020; Yeager et al, 2016). Here, we provide instructors with guidance on developing and adapting this approach at the classroom level – either by sharing the belonging stories of past students, or by sharing their own. 

Encouraging Connections in the Classroom: Students who feel connected to others in their learning community are more likely than those who do not to have better social and academic experiences during college, including higher emotional wellbeing, and better health (Jose et al., 2012; Walton et al., 2012; Yoon et al., 2012). Positive relationships between students and instructors, in particular, can boost self-efficacy, and promote greater engagement, academic achievement, and persistence among students (Vogt, 2008; Micari & Pazos, 2012; Christe, 2013). In this resource, we share some tips for ways that instructors can facilitate connections among students, and between students and the instructional team, ​​focusing specifically on how to help overcome the intimidation factor that often inhibits students – especially first generation students and students from structurally disadvantaged backgrounds – from approaching and engaging with instructors and other members of the instructional team.

The resources shared here were developed as part of the SEP Practices Library, a collection of evidence-based resource guides outlining practical approaches that instructors can use in their courses to promote engagement, increase equity in students’ experiences of their learning environments, and support academic success. While these resources can be used by individual instructors, early evidence from the Student Experience Project indicates that the change ideas are most effective when used collectively by groups of instructors in a community of practice. The SEP is currently developing a series of toolkits designed to support institutions in implementing change recommendations on a large scale. The first toolkit in the series, which focuses on course preparation and the first day of class, is scheduled to be released November 2021. If you are an administrator who is interested in access to our toolkits, please sign up here for the SEP Newsletter to be notified as resources become available. 

Author: 

  • Krysti Ryan, PhD, Director of Research, College Transition Collaborative 

References: 

Canning, E.A., Muenks, K., Green, D.J., & Murphy, M.C. (2019). STEM faculty who believe ability is fixed have larger racial achievement gaps and inspire less student motivation in their classes. Science Advances, 5(2).

Christe, Barbara (2013). The importance of faculty-student connections in STEM disciplines: A literature review. Journal of STEM Education 14(3).

McNair, T. B., Albertine, S. L., Cooper, M. A., McDonald, N. L., & Major, T. (2016). Becoming a student-ready college: A new culture of leadership for student success.

McNair, T.B., Bensimon, E.M., & Malcom‐Piqueux, L. (2020). From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education.

Micari, M., & Pazos, P. (2012). Connecting to the professor: Impact of the stu-dent–faculty relationship in a highly challenging course. College Teaching, 60(2), 41-47.

Murdock-Perriera, L. A., Boucher, K. L., Carter, E. R., & Murphy, M. C. (2019). Places of belonging: Person- and place-focused interventions to support belonging in college. Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research.

Murphy, M.C. & Destin, M. (2016). Promoting Inclusion and Identity Safety to Support College Success. Report prepared for The Century Foundation College Completion Series.

Murphy, M.C., Gopalan, M., Carter, E.R., Emerson, K.T.U., Bottoms, B.L., & Walton, G.M. (2020). A customized belonging intervention improves retention of socially disadvantaged students at a broad-access university. Science Advances, 6(29).

Murphy, M. C., & Taylor, V. J. (2012). The role of situational cues in signaling and maintaining stereotype threat. In M. Inzlicht & T. Schmader (Eds.), Stereotype threat: Theory, process, and application (p. 17–33). Oxford University Press.

Rattan, A., Savani, K., Komarraju, M., Morrison, M. M., Boggs, C., & Ambady, N. (2018). Meta-lay theories of scientific potential drive underrepresented students’ sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(1), 54–75.

Vogt, C.M. (2008), Faculty as a critical juncture in student retention and performance in engineering programs. Journal of Engineering Education, 97: 27-36.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. (2007).  A question of belonging: Race, social fit, and achievement. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92, 82-96.

Walton, G. M., & Cohen, G. L. (2011). A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students. Science, 331, 1447-1452. 

Walton G.M., Cohen G.L., Cwir D., Spencer S.J. (2012).  Mere belonging: The power of social connections. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 102(3):513-532.

Walton, G. M., Logel, C., Peach, J., Spencer, S, & Zanna, M. P. (2015). Two brief interventions to mitigate a “chilly” climate transform women’s experience, relationships, and achievement in engineering. Journal of Educational Psychology, 107, 468-485.

Yeager, D. S., Walton, G. M., Brady, S. T., Akcinar, E. N., Paunesku, D., Keane, L., Kamentz, D., Ritter, G., Duckworth, A. L., Urstein, R., Gomez, E. M., Markus, H. R., Cohen, G. L., & Dweck, C. S. (2016). Teaching a lay theory before college narrows achievement gaps at scale. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113. 

Yoon, E., Hacker, J., Hewitt, A., Abrams, M., & Cleary, S. (2012). Social connectedness, discrimination, and social status as mediators of acculturation/enculturation and well-being. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 59(1), 86–96.

Blog

Finishing Strong: An End of Term Message to Encourage Continued Growth

November 18, 2020

We are approaching the end of a tumultuous and exhausting academic term – for instructors and students alike. The challenges we collectively faced leading up to, and throughout, the Fall 2020 term laid bare the inequities of higher education, and elevated the urgency of our mandate as educators to more fully support the success and well-being of our students. Over the past several months, we have watched our colleagues rise to the challenges of this term, despite facing obstacles in their own lives, in order to provide thoughtful, quality instruction in courses disrupted by physical distancing requirements and social unrest. We have also seen students demonstrate incredible commitment to their learning and academic success in the face of these challenges. In an unprecedented term, our students have shown us their resiliency, engagement, and determination to realize their academic goals. 

As we finish this academic term, it is important to consider how we can continue to share messages of growth and inspire belonging for our students, even in the final weeks of the term and as we transition to thinking about the next term. The end of the Fall term is always a significant transition point for students — particularly first year or transfer students, who are wrapping up their first term in a new environment. Under normal circumstances, it would not at all be uncommon for students to be doubting their abilities, and wondering if they have what it takes to succeed in college, or in their desired major. During a term like this one, students, particularly those from underrepresented or underserved groups, are more likely than ever to be questioning whether or not they belong in college, and can reach their academic goals. When paired with the recognition that we will be heading into the Spring term facing many of the same obstacles that we faced in the Fall, and that the academic challenges faced during this term may be exacerbated in the next, motivation to engage through this term and persist to the next one may be harder to sustain. 

Now, more than ever, the end-of-term messages that we send our students about their academic performance and potential for growth is critical for supporting students’ academic retention and well being. By communicating clearly that ability is something that can be grown over time, and that challenges in this term do not indicate a lack of potential, instructors can help ensure that students will remain engaged, and persist in their educational goals, despite any setbacks they may have faced. Messages that convey a belief in students’ abilities to learn and grow their skills can also decrease experiences of identity threat, and increase levels of trust among students who belong to groups that are targeted by negative stereotypes about their abilities.

Below, we share a version of a brief end-of-term email that SEP Lead Scholar Dr. Kathryn Boucher sends to her students in the weeks before finals. In this email, Dr. Boucher acknowledges the challenges students may have faced in their academic careers this term, and reiterates the key aspects of effective growth mindset messaging: 

  1. Communicating that ability is something that students develop, and not the result of innate qualities
  2. Providing assurance that ability can be improved over time by applying effort, seeking feedback, and developing effective strategies for learning

Good afternoon all-

In this end of the week announcement, I wanted to send some encouragement for finishing out this semester strong. Across the course of this semester, we have focused on learning and applying our statistical knowledge. This hard work has required our effort, learning from feedback, and trying new strategies to succeed on our quizzes and homework assignments. I have seen growth, big and small, across the term. Importantly, it is not too late to grow in our mastery of our course content: ask questions, review my feedback, try out the additional practice problems, and find new ways to focus on our remaining course pieces. Even if your final grade in this course prompts the need to retake it in a future semester, this work will not be in vain. You will have a firmer foundation to start from and have more tools in your toolkit for how to be successful from the outset. Also, this semester isn’t the best yardstick for your eventual success in our major and in college. It’s been a rough one for many, so you should be proud of your persistence and resilience; I know I am. I might not see you in another class until closer to graduation, but I will look forward to seeing you then. 

Best,

Dr. Boucher   

 

Authors:

  • Kathryn Boucher, PhD, Assiociate Professor, College of Applied Behavioral Sciences, University of Indianapolis, and Principal Investigator,  College Transition Collaborative 
  • Krysti Ryan, PhD, Director of Research, College Transition Collaborative 

Blog

Institutional Trust and the Student Experience: Insights from Claude Steele and Mary Murphy

October 21, 2020

How can institutions take an anti-racist approach to diversity and inclusion initiatives? How can institutions include faculty in efforts to transform student experience? These are just some of the questions that Dr. Claude Steele and Dr. Mary Murphy addressed during a Reinvention Collaborative town hall on October 13. Steele and Murphy’s conversation introduced the town hall audience to many of the social-psychological concepts and studies that inform the work of the Student Experience Project. These studies speak to practices that fundamentally redesign the learning environment to engender trust between faculty and students  and support equitable experiences for all students.

Following Steele and Murphy’s conversation, Dr. Denise Bartell (University of Toledo), Dr. Tiffany Mfume (Morgan State University), and Dr. John Smail (University of North Carolina at Charlotte) highlighted the success of incorporating these principles into institutional change efforts through their involvement with the SEP. Each campus has engaged faculty to revise their syllabi to include social belonging and growth mindset messages, reinforcing Steele and Murphy’s emphasis on the critical importance of empowering faculty as part of institutional change and anti-racism efforts.

Dr. Bartell emphasized how the Student Experience Project has allowed faculty at the University of Toledo to support one another in establishing identity safety in the classroom. A community of “equity champions” participating in SEP activities have been meeting weekly to discuss how classroom practices can mitigate some of the structural and systemic bias that leads to inequitable outcomes. Additionally, the University of Toledo has used the SEP’s principles of psychologically-attuned messaging to develop a rubric that departments can use to evaluate their websites and get recommendations on how to include more attuned messaging to better support student experience.

At Morgan State University, part of the Peer Learning Network, over 30 faculty members have taken part in workshops on growth mindset and utilized SEP materials to revise their syllabi. Dr. Mfume emphasized that faculty can make small messaging and policy changes, especially in the syllabus and on the first day of class, that have a big impact on students and how they feel in a particular course. One method for communicating care for students that resonated with faculty at Morgan State was putting a note in the syllabus about email communication, indicating that faculty sometimes fall behind on emails when balancing heavy course loads, and encouraging students to follow up with faculty if they don’t receive a response.

UNC Charlotte’s approach to student success includes supporting a large population of transfer students, many of whom are low-income and from underrepresented background. Dr. Smail highlighted that working directly with faculty to improve the classroom experience is one lever for change that is within the institution’s control and relatively insulated from outside factors. With over 60 faculty currently involved with the Student Experience Project, UNC Charlotte is considering how to scale these efforts to more faculty and more classrooms. Additionally, UNC Charlotte’s SEP team has been developing student-attuned messaging for early alerts.

Thank you to the Reinvention Collaborative for sponsoring this event and highlighting the work of the Student Experience Project. Click here to view the recording of this town hall.

Blog

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to Next Page »
About
Resources
SEP in Action

Contact Us
Privacy Policy

Accessibility
Terms of Use

Want to learn more about the SEP? Join our mailing list.

© 2019 Student Experience Project

About
Our Work
News

Resources
Contact Us

Twitter_Logo_Blue

Accessibility
Terms of Use

Want to learn more about the SEP? Join our mailing list.

Twitter_Logo_Blue FB icon

© 2021 Student Experience Project