Washburn’s Mabee Library announced the implementation of new programs dedicated for student success.

In addition to a variety of others, Alan Bearman, dean of university libraries, shared the details in regard to student success interventions that began this summer at New Student Orientation. After the incorporation of the new program Ellucian Advise that provides student data beyond only academic factors and working with the Student Aid Report team, academic advisors in the Center for Student Success and Retention are now taking a close look at the profile of every student participant of New Student Orientation. Advisors are actively examining success/probability scores of potential undergraduates and designing individualized interventions in order to increase chances of each one of them for retention and on-time graduation.

Basing the technique on a nationally recognized program at Georgia State University, the team at Mabee Library has been working on developing the capacity to assign success/probability scores. Accompanied with the Data Management Project, the Student Success Center is able to access a growing amount of longitudinal data that is based upon significantly more student records than of the students who attended in the last four years.

“Combined these efforts, we believe, are rapidly advancing our understanding of what interventions individual students need to experience success during their transition into the Washburn University Community of Learning,” Bearman wrote in an email.

Each academic advisor is assigned to each section of WU101, thus after examining the success/probability scores they will begin contacting students in their specific section to begin discussing and implementing a variety of possible success interventions in a mutual collaboration.

“Some students, for example, will find themselves encouraged to visit the Center for Prior Learning and Testing to work in either MyFoundationsLab or LearningExpress to improve their basic learning skills,” Bearman wrote in his email to Washburn faculty. “We will ask others to discuss their course load with us, while others based upon identified factors may become the recipient of an offer of student employment because the research tells us that for identified students job increases their probability of success by 105%.”