As supported by Tinto’s 1975 Student Integration Model and persistence scholarship thereafter, institutions of higher education have looked internally to examine how they can better support students academically. While, ironically, little attention is paid by persistence scholars and higher education administrators to promote collaborative efforts between student success
administrators and academic departments (Holmes & Busser; Ruecker et. al, 2017), universities have sought to enact strategies outside of the classroom that can assist in students’ academic improvement. Some of these initiatives can be ineffective, for the reason I have just stated: because they require students to complete certain tasks out of context or that are seemingly irrelevant to their academic needs and expectations. However, my study has found that both freshman learning communities and supplemental instruction effectively facilitate students’ abilities to assess their individual academic needs and utilize the retention initiative to improve their chances of success. These findings support initiatives being launched within writing programs across the country to support student persistence, including writing fellows’ programs (which I explore in Chapter 4) and students’ directed self-placement into English courses with lab components (Brunk-Chavez & Fredericksen; Chemishanova & Snead).
At Georgia State, over 70% of students participate in freshman learning communities, cohorts of students that are grouped together usually for all of their classes in their first semester based on commonality, such as their major or, as one participant experienced, a shared
scholarship. Success Academy and the Panther Excellence Program are examples of freshman learning communities. While freshman learning communities are not mandated for all students, they are highly recommended by the university, which positions incoming students to have to opt out of the program if they do not want to be in a cohort.
Freshman learning communities are one example of an initiative that facilitates students’ individual abilities to persist in college. Specifically, students representing varied lifestyles and possessing a range of priorities are able to utilize the cohort dynamic they are provided to build academic support systems. In one scenario, for example, many of the participants with whom I spoke, representing 10 different cohorts, created with their peers a group messaging system by
using the app GroupMe. A messaging app that can be downloaded to an iOS, Android, or Windows device, GroupMe allows users to send text and picture messages to as many people as they want in a single, private conversation. For some students, like Destiny, a low-income student who balanced participating in school clubs and job hunting with her first year of college, this app allowed her and her peers to work together on assignments and keep each other
accountable, a practice she explained continued to take place following her first semester, when her and her cohort shared only one or two classes together rather than a full schedule. According to Destiny and other students I spoke with, the messaging app was used often to check in with others about what they might have missed in class, to set up study groups, and at times, to offer each other an advantage over particular assignments, such as talking through their answers before posting responses online, or what Destiny refers to as “finess[ing] your way through college.” Prompted solely by the ingenuity of students, the GroupMe app is the result of students identifying on their own a strategy that could effectively leverage their familiarity with
technology and relationships within their freshman learning community to improve their chances academically. The structure of freshman learning communities, in other words, allowed for students to be creative and identify how best to use their resources.
Another retention initiative at Georgia State that effectively facilitates students’ paths toward academic success is supplemental instruction, an initiative that is optional for students in freshman learning communities and mandated for those enrolled in Success Academy and Panther Excellence Programs. Very similar to supplemental instruction programs found at other universities, Georgia State’s supplemental instruction program consists of free study groups for typically difficult courses led by current Georgia State students who have already excelled in that particular course. Supplemental instruction leaders attend the course lectures and then prepare
engaging lessons for their study groups to complement the lecture. Students in Success Academy are required to attend one of two supplemental instruction sessions offered per week during the summer and Panther Excellence students are required to attend a certain number of times during the fall semester.
While the supplemental instruction initiative posed some logistical constraints for students and bothered others because it was mandatory, all participants spoke highly of
supplemental instruction because of its small group, student-centered dynamic. Illuminating the pedagogical style of one supplemental instruction leader for Philosophy, Sydney describes why the mandatory tutoring worked for her:
He [the SI leader] really just summarizes the whole thing, because we just discuss in Philosophy. We don’t really talk; well, we don’t really figure out if this is right, like what it really is. So, he really summarizes it for us and gives us kind of like, breaks us up and gives us like a question and answer, like that’s the opposite of other groups and it really helps for the test.
Here, Sydney, a residential student, is referring to the practice of providing half the group with questions and the other half with answers so that students can work together to learn, not just what the solutions are, but how to achieve those solutions. She and other students, commuters and campus residents, consistently talked about how the small group dynamic and their leaders’ different perspectives worked well to reinforce what they were learning in their courses.
Mandated supplemental instruction posed some time constraints for commuter students and prompted much confusion for students who, repeatedly, spoke of the Student Success Center’s poor communication regarding when sessions were available and how many times students needed to attend. Nonetheless, the majority of students I spoke with found the initiative
useful because they were given space to address the things they did not understand in their classes. Offering similar benefits to writing fellows programs (Severino & Knight, 2007), or programs that embed writing center tutors into classrooms to work with students’ one-on-one on their assigned papers, students realized with supplemental instruction the importance of speaking with someone else about their work, while also recognizing the value of support services more generally. Because, like freshman learning communities, supplemental instruction gives room for students to use the initiative as a resource in order to boost their own success, in this case
through asking questions they personally had from their classes, students planned to or already were attending voluntarily following the semesters it was mandatory.
Both freshman learning communities and supplemental instruction reveal the potential retention initiatives possess to boost students’ academic progress should those initiatives respect students’ agency. While these particular initiatives are not voluntary for all students, a factor writing program administration scholar Sarah Harris (2017) argues is central to the effectiveness of supplemental instruction meetings, the initiatives themselves are not intrusive in nature, as Georgia State touts of its advising system. Rather, freshman learning communities and
supplemental instruction provide structures within which students can choose how the service can best accommodate their unique set of academic needs.