e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Summer Melt

  • Our First Standard of Proof Webinar, on Beating Summer Melt

    Our First Standard of Proof Webinar, on Beating Summer Melt

    I am just thrilled to post the archive of our inaugural Standard of Proof webinar:

    Summer Melt Standard of Proof webinar
    https://youtu.be/7NoYUa_VHfs

    It is a near-perfect encapsulation of everything that the Empirical Educator Project aspires to promote and foster: front-line educators, academic researchers, and commercial vendors working together to measurably increase student success and to do so in a way that is both persuasive in terms of the rigor of evidence and repeatable by other institutions.

    As a reminder, Standard of Proof highlights academic collaborations by the Empirical Educator Project’s commercial sponsors with academic researchers and academic practitioners. All projects must either contribute new knowledge to the commons or promote the diffusion of established evidence-backed practices.

    In this case, we have a story of a small EdTech start-up—AdmitHub—that has a total of nine randomized controlled trials either completed or in process with academic partner institutions.

    Nine.

    How many of your EdTech vendors have nine randomized controlled trials either done or in the works? How many have one? How many have you even asked this question? (If you want better answers on the first two questions, then try to improve your answer to the last one.)

    They were able to do this, in part, because institutions like Georgia State University had real leaders, like GSU’s Tim Renick, who refused to accept the proposition that disadvantaged students were already beyond help by the time they got to college. Instead, the GSU folks (and their colleagues at other academic institutions conducting research with AdmitHub) set out to study their own practices and identify areas that they were failing students in ways that could be fixed. Using data, with the help of their vendor and an academic researcher—in this case, University of Pittsburgh Professor and summer melt expert Lindsay Page—GSU demonstrated that we can make education better and more equitable. It is the perfect counter-example to the sad situation I described in my post on what I didn’t see at EDUCAUSE.

    This is the future that we all should be reaching for, folks. And it is reachable, as all three of my guests made clear. The video is well worth an hour of your time. Standard of Proof webinar production values will improve as we learn our craft, but the conversation quality just doesn’t get much better than this.

    We’re actively working on the spring webinar line-up and will have some juicy conversations scheduled by the time you return from your holiday break.

    Watch this space.

  • Summer Melt

    Summer Melt: Read this book

    This post is partly a nudge for you to sign up for the inaugural e-Literate Standard of Proof webinar coming up this Monday at 2 PM and partly a post to tell you why I’m so excited to be kicking off the series with this particular story.

    My macro thesis for a while now has been that colleges and universities are in the early stages of a transformation from having a philosophical commitment to student success toward being operationally excellent at supporting and enabling student success. That proposition has been a little abstract for some. If you want to understand what that looks like in the real world, I can’t think of a better example than Georgia State University (GSU) under Tim Renick’s leadership. And this webinar will tell the story of one of his seminal achievements.

    Summer Melt is the classic example of the kind of problem that is traditionally invisible to universities that think of student success as a philosophical commitment rather than a core operational responsibility. It’s the phenomenon where students graduate high school, apply to college, get admitted, say they’re coming, fully intend to come, and then never show up. It disproportionately hits first-generation students, students of color, and economically disadvantaged students. Why? Because getting from admission to the first day of classes is a lot harder than many of us remember. You have to fill out a FAFSA form, which as Renick put it yesterday in his IMS presentation, is basically a tax return. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fill out my FAFSA. My dad did. Not every seventeen-year-old is lucky enough to be able to hand off that responsibility. Then there are inoculations, forms to be filled out and signed by relatives with whom you may or may not have contact, places to get to, fees to pay, and so on, and so on. In their eponymous book on the topic, researchers Benjamin Castleman and Lindsay Page tell us,

    In some school districts where as many as 40 percent of college-intending students fail to matriculate, it would be more appropriate to refer to this as a “summer flood.”

    Castleman and Page, Summer Melt: Supporting Low-Income Students Through the Transition to College

    Forty. Percent.

    And some of these problems are very solvable—if you know about them. For example, once the GSU folks realized that immunizations were a problem that was preventing students from getting to the first day of classes, they started parking free immunization trucks outside during times when those soon-to-be students would be visiting campus.

    The trick is knowing. So Tim Renick and his team partnered with an AI chatbot company called AdmitHub. It turns out that their CEO, Drew Magliozzi, had read the summer melt book too. And he thought his tool could do something about it. GSU brought in AdmitHub to try it out. But they also brought in Lindsay Page to conduct a randomized controlled trial. It’s one thing to say that you think your intervention improved a problem. It’s quite another to gather credible evidence.

    And that’s what they did. According to GSU’s web page on the topic,

    To help these students, the university identified the common obstacles to enrollment that students face between graduating high school and the start of college, including financial aid applications and documents, immunization records, placement exams and class registration, among others. Georgia State developed an approach that would help at-risk students through these obstacles by instituting a combination of a new student portal to guide students through the steps needed to be ready for the first day of classes and an artificial-intelligence-enhanced chatbot, “Pounce,” to answer thousands of questions from incoming students 24/7 via text messages on their smart devices.

    In 2016, during the first summer of implementation, Pounce delivered more than 200,000 answers to questions asked by incoming freshmen, and the university reduced summer melt by 22 percent. This translated into an additional 324 students sitting in their seats for the first day of classes at Georgia State rather than sitting out the college experience.

    GSU, “Reduction of Summer Melt“

    The “Standard of Proof” webinar series is designed to tell stories like this one: Universities working with credible vendor partners to learn and share something new and important about supporting students that is a benefit to the entire sector.

    This is a canonical example of that, folks.

    Sign up for the webinar.

    The webinar: Come for the enlightenment. Bring your own food.