Create structures focused on the first-year experience –scaled summer bridge program, freshman learning communities, meta-major based curricular and co-curricular activities-to promote student belonging and to guide students into right-fit academic majors in the first year.
In the space provided, indicate your general evaluation plan, including the key performance indicators and measures for the project; how frequently you are assessing, your baseline measure, your goal or target for success and your status.
KPIs:
Improved FTFT retention to 85% by 2030.
Incrementally, 3% each increase for each cohort.
FTFT Baseline is 69.83% for most recent cohort (FA23).
Aspirational outcomes by cohort
24-25 Cohort: 72.83%
25-26 Cohort: 75.83%
26-27 Cohort: 78.83%
27-28 Cohort: 81.83%
28-29 Cohort: 84.83 %
29-30 Cohort: 87.83%
Cougar Success Academy Pilot successfully launched summer 24, combining the previous programs (Cougar Launch & Cougar Scholars). This for credit summer bridge program was comprised of 2 IMPACTS core courses (COMM 1110 & POLS 1101), as well as academic supports and social belonging activities. Academic support included workshops provided by tutoring, advising, career services, and the library. Social activities included a movie night, a pool party, a white-water rafting excursion, bowling/laser tag, and a game night. Most students lived in the dorm and roomed together, with a dedicated resident assistant as an additional support resource.
Cougar Success Pilot Outcomes: 31 students enrolled, 11 students completed the bridge with 4.0 or better, overall GPA 3.18. Students report they found friends, understood better what their fall semester would look like, and the resources available. The faculty report that students were engaged, performed well, and seemed to enjoy the classes.
FLCs were resurrected for FA24; we had not offered FLCs in years. For FA 24 (and SP25), we developed learning communities by our 7 academic focus areas (Business, Fine/Performing Arts, Education, Health Professions, STEM, Humanities, & Social Science). Outcomes are pending for both fall 24 and spring 25 semesters.
In FA 24, we had an additional FLC that was developed specifically for our Access Mission (Associate Pathway) students, where student supports were delivered in the classroom throughout the semester with workshops and class presentations (How to College, Academic Scavenger Hunt, Advising 101, Library Services, Wellness, Registration Assistance, & Celebration (end of term party). The FLC was designed this way to ensure that students understood available resources. This population tends to opt out of seeking assistance. Outcomes are pending, but preliminary conversations with faculty suggest that this group of students is performing better than the previous year’s cohort academically and are more engaged in class.
We are hoping that we will be able to scale Cougar Success Academy this summer and enroll up to 150 students. We learned a lot from our summer 24 pilot and plan to have faculty/staff in residence this summer, as well as more structured activities. We are pending the finalization of the 25-26 IMPACTs core to select the two courses that students will be taking. We have moved up application deadlines to ensure that we have the time to provide the individual attention that students need to prepare for the summer semester so soon after high school graduation.
We also hope to evaluate and improve our FLCs once the semester data is available. Registration in the FLCs is manual and can be confusing since we do not have block scheduling built out in Banner. This is a direction we hope to take in the future.
We have a lot more work to do in the first-year experience area and will be spending a lot of time on developing programming and support, as well as assessments in SP25 to deploy in FA25. We also hope to begin developing sophomore experiences as well. Many of these anticipated activities are tied in and dependent on the finalization of our IMPACTs core redesign, which is ongoing this fall. We also anticipate changes in staffing in this area.
CSU is in the process of purchasing CLASS with Courseleaf to aid in section data entry, course projections, and development of FLCs to support first-year experience.
CSU is exploring the purchasing of Series25, which will replace AdAstra and aid in the development of a more centralized approach to course scheduling.
Challenges : Engaging students and fostering active participation in first-year experience programs from all campus stakeholders. Additionally, aligning resources to sustain support and data-driven initiatives can be demanding in maintaining long-term student success outcomes.
Support needed: We are engaged with the National Institute of Student Success in implementing our NISS playbook, so we feel confident we have the necessary support to complete these activities.
We will need to work with Lynn Miller to develop block schedules for the FLCs, that are easier for advisors and students to navigate at the present time and require manual work to accomplish course registration.
