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College of San Mateo
1700 W. Hillsdale Blvd.
San Mateo, CA 94402
tel. 650.574.6161
collegeofsanmateo.edu

 

 

   


PROJECT SUCCESS:
CSM CURRICULUM REDESIGN INITIATIVE

SUMMARY OF PROJECT

College of San Mateo's (CSM) new project, the Project Success: Curriculum Redesign Initiative, will address the need to improve measurably semester-length and term-to-term persistence throughout the college by creating a revitalized and internally promoted student success curriculum. Over the last decade, the student success curriculum, "housed" in CSM's Career (CRER) coursework, has evolved into a disparate collection of over a dozen separate CRER courses. Many of them were initially developed to address the needs of a more homogeneous population of students than the greatly diverse population CSM now serves. The core orientation-to-college class, College and Career Success, (CRER 120), and the collection of courses dedicated to career planning (CRER 121, 122, 123) do not adequately address the fact that virtually all our students currently work, whether their short- and long-range goals include transfer to a baccalaureate institution or plans to upgrade their vocational skills. Considerable duplication exists among the course descriptions, creating confusion for academic advising/counseling staff, faculty, and students alike. Many official course descriptions and the associated curriculum materials shared by the student services faculty do not consistently reflect the best practices strategies validated by the current research on student success. And as a whole, the student success curriculum is not adequately promoted to capture the enrollment of students who would greatly benefit from effective student success courses and who are diverse in levels of preparation and in their life-planning, vocational, and academic goals.

The project hasl established a team of academic advisors and student services counselors to redesign the orientation-to-college course and the group of career-related courses and to make planning recommendations about all student success courses as body of complementary courses. The team engaged in professional development activities to increase their knowledge about recent research on learning and instructional design in student success curriculum. And they worked to educate all the college constituencies–students, instructional faculty, student services staff, and managers–about the potential impact of the revitalized student success curriculum on students' performance outcomes.

 

Background

Counseling and Advising Staff Functions: A staff of more than forty full- and part-time advisors/counselors provides academic, career, and personal counseling to approximately 12,000 students and potential students each semester. Of this staff, nearly three-quarters are academic advisors, whose primary assignments are within instruction divisions. Counselors are certificated personnel whose primary assignments are to provide student services functions: several of them have expertise with special

populations and may work exclusively with identified populations and services supporting those populations; e.g. psychological services, disabled students programs, and EOPS, to name a few.

One of CSM's strengths is that advising/counseling is a decentralized function, relying heavily on academic advisors with instructional assignments. The close identification of counseling, advising, and teaching, together with the accessibility of teaching faculty to counselors, generally fosters a broad understanding of the counseling function on the part of the general faculty and helps to eliminate an artificial separation of the two functions, which are so closely related. Direct participation in departmental activities by faculty advisors also provides some opportunities for the faculty at large to interpret and explore counseling issues, and for the college as a whole to be relatively informed about the importance of effective advising/counseling in the development of a student's educational plan. This structure helps ensure that the curriculum redesign effort will be informed by the expertise from both instructional faculty and student services staff and that it will reflect a shared assessment of students' needs.

Counselors teach the Career and Life Planning curriculum, which includes all the student success courses. In a typical semester, 10 different Career and Life Planning courses are offered, distributed among over 30 separate sections. While all of these courses include student success issues as part of the curriculum (and meet the criteria for student success courses as defined by the State-wide Student Success Course Initiative) the course Introduction to College is explicitly designed to assist and prepare students for college through skills assessment and education planning. Eleven sections of Introduction to College include several sections originally designed to address the needs of specific populations: EOPS students, those with limited English backgrounds, participants in Puente, concurrently enrolled high school students, and international students with F-1 visas.

 

Challenges for CSM

Under-enrolled Student Success Courses: Despite a full range of student success courses, there are several signs that the student success curriculum is not adequately capturing student interest. With the exception of selected student success sections addressing the needs of specific populations, such as EOPS students, Career and Life Planning courses as a whole do not reach enrollment capacity consistently. In Fall 1997, for example, 81% of the 32 sections offered enrolled fewer than 20 students. Total enrollment was 578. In Spring 1997, of the 25 sections offered, 72% enrolled fewer than 20 students. Total enrollment was 557. While the college makes several exceptions for a variety of programmatic reasons, the usual minimum class size is 20 students. In Fall 1997, for example, the college-wide average for a class size was slightly above 31.

As a related institutional issue, the college is increasingly concerned with managing enrollment and in 1999 established an enrollment management taskforce. In fact, one college goal for 1997-98 was to "generate at least 50% of total the District (San Mateo County Community College District) resident FTES and 330 non-resident FTES."

Recent Data about Retention and Persistence: Course retention and term-to-term persistence problems are multi-determined, and no one intervention can solely address these issues, nor is there a single cause. However, CSM's student success curriculum, as it is now designed, appears not to affect student outcomes measurably.

In December 1993, CSM submitted an extensive student equity plan to the State Chancellor's Office. It included dozens of recommended activities to improve student success, addressing the areas of access, outreach, retention, transfer, goal completion, and progression beyond basic skills and ESL courses. Since submission of the report, the college-wide student equity committee (with members from management, faculty, counseling, and classified staff) has met regularly to address barriers to student equity and solicit concrete data of performance measures. With assistance from the Dean of Articulation and Research, the college now has considerable data about retention patterns. This data suggest to the college the need to redesign student success curriculum as one of several strategic interventions.

 

A Context for Improving Access, Retention, and Persistence

Institutional Goals: Among the college's on-going institutional ambitions is "to effect institutional change." Such change includes the ability to:

• provide students a learning environment that propels them toward becoming autonomous, self-regulated learners and able contributors to society and the global economy;

• expand meaningful access to higher education to an increasingly diverse group of students; and

• develop a climate in which diversity is genuinely valued and progress toward becoming more diverse is regularly achieved.

The college is engaged in many different initiatives and types of activities intended to align its programs and services with the components of this overarching institutional ambition. It has initiated numerous strategies to improve student equity and its indicators of student success: course completion, retention, and progression beyond basic skills courses. They include, among others: 1) discipline-specific curriculum revision in basic skills classes (e.g. mathematics, ESL, English composition, and reading); and 2) ongoing evaluation and revision of population-specific student support efforts (e.g. programs that address the special needs of re-entry students, the disabled, ethnic groups historically at-risk).

Current Student Needs: Of the nearly 12,000 students enrolled at the college, 75% are employed, with 10% of the employed population working more than 40 hours per week. Seventy-five percent of currently enrolled students are attending CSM part-time. Students’ demanding work loads often make it difficult for them to schedule semester-long classes or use on-campus advising/counseling services; thus, the flexibility of delivery is not only attractive but increasingly essential. The average student age at CSM is 27, and 55% of enrolled students are 25 or older. As the student population at CSM increases in age, their responsibilities and the demands on their time also grow. Often they must balance family responsibilities with work and educational needs. At least half are the sole providers for themselves or their families, a proportion that other evidence suggests is only increasing.

Like most community colleges in the S.F. Bay Area, CSM serves a population of students who are taking courses to upgrade their job skills or prepare for career advancement or a career change. Approximately 10% of enrolled students declared they were currently enrolled in courses to update their job skills or achieve job advancement; however, anecdotal evidence suggests that this percentage is much higher at CSM.

The needs suggested by the demographic makeup of CSM's student population along with the retention and course completion data cited earlier, has several implications for this curriculum redesign project:

• student success courses need to be delivered in flexible formats;

• students need options for meeting requirements for certificates, A.A. degrees, or transfer to baccalaureate institutions that represent an efficient, productive use of their limited time and does not involve needless duplication of their efforts;

• student success courses need to address the pervasive need for career planning curriculum in both the core orientation-to-college class, Introduction to College, and in the separate group of courses explicitly dedicated to career issues; and

• any curriculum redesign of selected student success courses must address the needs of a current population of students who are diverse in ethnicity, native language, and levels of preparedness and must, therefore, involve collaboration from both student services and instruction.

Need to Update Student Services Curriculum: However, despite the exemplary and effective efforts of numerous instructional programs and student services initiatives to realize the college's ambition "to effect institutional change," the following area of student services needs addressing:

• the student success curriculum as a whole was initially developed nearly a decade ago, designed for a more homogenous student population that has become extremely diverse in recent years; it needs to reflect current research about best practices in student success curriculum for today's population of students.

Many counseling instructors of student success courses maintain currency in their instructional materials and pedagogy. However, any curriculum redesign effort must not only develop the professional skills of individual instructors, but be embodied in revised college-approved course objectives. Those course objectives need to also reflect the extensive current research on student success courses and shape the classroom activities of all assigned instructors. Of the student success curriculum, this initiative focuses specifically on the core orientation-to-college class, Introduction to College, and on the collection of several career planning courses.

Numerous studies have researched the performance of groups of students who have participated in student success courses compared to those who have not. While for some institutions, particularly private institutions, a student success course is defined exclusively as a freshman seminar, student success courses may effectively take a variety of forms. The ACT National Center for Advancement of Educational Practices' publication, Increasing Student Competence and Persistence, and the University of South Carolina's National Resource Center for the Freshman Year Experience's 1993 monograph, Exploring the Evidence: Reporting the Outcomes of Freshman Seminars, provide abundant evidence that student success courses, in various iterations, improve retention. David Ellis and John Gardner, in particular, have contributed extensively to the research on student success curriculum, validating its usefulness in ensuring student persistence. In California specifically, the State-wide Student Success Course Initiative, funded by a grant from the State Chancellor's Office, is actively documenting how student success courses improve student outcomes in cost-effective ways.

Need for a Core Student Success Course that Meets Several Degree and Transfer Requirements: Introduction to College is currently offered as a one-unit, semester-long course that addresses numerous aspects of skills assessment and educational planning. As a one-unit offering, the course can not adequately address all of students' career planning needs, among other areas. In addition, there are three-unit requirements to meet the California State University requirement for Area E, Lifelong Understanding and Self Development. At CSM A.A./A.S. degree requirements include at least three units from the area of Career Exploration and Self Development. To take advantage fully of the skills and knowledge offered by the core student success class, students need a variety of opportunities for efficiently applying their units toward degrees or certificate and transfer requirements:

• Introduction to College needs to be offered in single or two-unit, flexibly scheduled blocks or as a comprehensive three-unit course.

Need for a Coherent Career-Planning Curriculum: The Spring 1998 semester class schedule listed six different classes, which in some manner address career planning issues: College Re-entry, I-III, Voyages: Career and Life Planning (a telecourse delivered through KCSM TV, channel 60), Career Choices, Life and Career Planning, Skill Development for Career Growth, and Career Exploration. Neither the college catalog nor the class schedule effectively denotes the precise differences among these courses, nor the student preparation levels each course addresses. This duplication and redundancy, in part, reflects the evolution of these courses as they were developed over the last decade. However, given the overall insufficient enrollment in student success courses and anecdotal feedback from faculty, faculty advisors, student services counselors, administrators, and students, the college as a whole is confused about the exact content of these courses, and the degree requirements which they meet. Clearly, there is a mandate to revise current curriculum and/or create tightly focused new curriculum that reflects the needs of our almost exclusively working population of students:

• all career-planning curriculum needs to be examined and redesigned to avoid duplication, meet students' degree and transfer requirements, and effectively address the diverse lifestyles of the student population.

• strategic planning should occur which results in a coherent curriculum that is well-understood by the college as a whole, addresses the needs of currently employed students, and is a productive and cost-effective use of instructional and student services staff.

 

EVALUATION

This web site contains the results of the evaluation of Project Success. Evaluative daa was obtained through the following methods:

• Participating staff will be surveyed regarding the quality of their professional development experiences and whether they feel their skills and knowledge have been increased in meaningful, applicable ways.

• Students will be surveyed through focus groups concerning the quality of the new and revised career planning curriculum.

• Students will also be surveyed through focus groups concerning whether the new structures for delivering student success curriculum (e.g. options of enrolling in short modules offered in flexible ways or in three-unit more traditional formats) affects their likelihood to enroll in one or more of the revised courses or new classes, and whether the likelihood of enrollment is affected measurably by specific marketing efforts.
  • Student academic performance, including course completion rates and persistence rates, will be analyzed comparing the "old" CRER curriculum with the "new" CRER curriculum.

 

PROJECT OUTCOMES

Impact on Students: The Project Success: Curriculum Redesign Initiative will benefit targeted students in the following ways:

1) increase the likelihood of students' enrollment in student success courses as a result of improved marketing and a more coherent, easily-understood student services curriculum;

2) give students scheduling flexibility to help them meet work and family commitments, increasing their access to student services curriculum;

3) provide opportunities for students to enroll in student success courses which efficiently meet their general education requirements for degree, certificate, or transfer programs;

4) provide students with increased educational opportunities through an effective career planning curriculum that supports their career changes or upgrading of their job skills; and

5) give students the opportunity to learn at their own pace through flexible formats that are well-matched to their learning styles.

Impact on the College and District: The Project Success: Curriculum Redesign Initiative promises to benefit CSM and District in the following areas:

 

1) develop academic advisors' and student services counselors' leadership, collaboration, and expertise regarding instructional design of student success curriculum;

2) improve the college’s ability to attract mature and working students and to accommodate a diverse population in need of a variety of flexible options;

3) create models of a core orientation-to-college course and career planning courses that can be replicated elsewhere and be adapted for other student success curriculum;

4) increase the number of staff prepared to develop and teach student success courses; and

5) assist in the development of long-range plans for the growth of student success curriculum that will serve as a guide for action planning, allocation of staff development resources, fundraising efforts, and collaboration across the college and District.

 

Institutional Commitment

Research suggests that students who enroll in effective student success courses need to spend less time individually with advisors/counselors. Student success courses, whether they focus specifically on career and life planning or serve explicitly as orientation-to-college life, create a structure in which students may pose problems they face in meeting their learning objectives. They provide collaborative opportunities for students' peers and the instructor to suggest interventions, to propose strategies for addressing their academic and lifestyle problems, and to make referrals to appropriate on-campus student support services and community agencies. An increase in enrollment in these student success courses may, thus, reduce the overall number of hours spent in individual advising to allow counselors and faculty advisors to focus more efficiently on assisting students to make the most informed choices about their educational plans and/or on assisting students considered at risk and who need more individual time more effectively–all a productive and cost-effective way of using staff time to help ensure better retention.

CSM also sees other outcomes that can be institutionalized as a result of this project. The research and data collection efforts as well as professional development activities can assist in informing or establishing future performance goals which can be integrated into the planning of yearly college-wide institutional ambition and goals. They include goals for: term-to-term persistence; the number of degrees and certificates awarded; rate of successful transfer; numbers of sections of student success courses offered, among other areas.