Supplemental Updates for South Georgia State College - 2023

Observations and Next Steps

• We are extremely pleased to report that SGSC has made significant progress in getting students to complete the “Getting to Know Our Students” survey.  If other USG institutions are having difficulty with student participation, they might try our solution.  In previous years, SGSC emailed the target students at their school email address, then sent a follow-up email encouraging participation. During this same time, we launched our mindset-focused virtual student workshop series, which is housed in a D2L shell. We had very high student participation in our workshop series and found that they were quite responsive to messages sent there. This gave us the idea to use this space to recruit survey participants. We emailed the recruitment script to all SGSC students through D2L and also posted it as an announcement on the Virtual Workshop’s course homepage. Based on several comments from students, we believe they were more inclined to follow through because it felt like a course assignment. One student commented it was visible in his D2L alerts, so he did not forget to check it out.  Our student response rate has moved from 1 in 2021 to 14 in 2022 to 111 in 2023, the latter year being the first administration after our using the D2L strategy.  Now that we have a statistically significant number of student responses, we can use and share the survey data to better understand our students’ growth, purpose/value, and sense of belonging mindsets, as well as to compare our students’ mindsets to those of state college sector and System institutions.
• During the past  year, the most effective strategies have been the BOOST Mindset activities, Area A completion interventions, and the research symposium—all of which show significant student and faculty/staff participation and very positive achievement results.  We will continue to implement these strategies and encourage increased student participation.  The main adjustment needed is with assessment of the research symposium.  It is quite clear that participation in the symposium on the part of student presenters, faculty mentors, and student/community attendees is excellent.  However, we are exploring methods of determining the degree of learning taking place.
• The other two strategies, concierge coaching and career connections/counseling, while showing positive results, are more difficult to manage and need improvement.  Communication with students to strengthen their relationships with coaches is the paramount issue with concierge coaching, and making up for the loss of our Senior Career Services Coordinator is a big concern.  Because concierge coaching, our “Big Idea,” is definitely a “big” and good idea that has produced very positive results since its inception, we are determined to invigorate that program through finding ways to improve the connections between students and coaching advisors.  During the past year we have had to make adjustments to both concierge coaching and career services, as discussed in the narrative above for each of those strategies.