Supplemental Instruction With Mentoring Support

Purpose

All across the nation, community colleges are striving to reconcile their open admissions policy with the obligation to give students a reasonable chance of fulfilling their academic goals. The project at Anne Arundel Community College--an adaptation of a University of Kansas model for four-year institutions--explored some non-traditional ways to provide students in required science, mathematics, business and social sciences courses the support they needed for academic survival and success.

Innovative Features

The project consists of regularly-scheduled study sessions for courses in the areas mentioned above. The sessions are conducted by student leaders who themselves have completed the course in the past. These students undergo a three-credit practicum at the beginning of the semester, and then reenroll in the course alongside the participants in their study sessions. In the sessions, the student leaders demonstrate study strategies such as collaborative problem-solving, graphic representation of abstract concepts, practice tests, memorization techniques, and learning games.

Each student leader is paired with a faculty mentor who has participated in a three-day training seminar on pedagogical issues. For the first four weeks of the semester, faculty mentors participate as learners in the courses and study sessions whose student leaders they supervise. Mentors are placed in courses outside their disciplines in order to allow students to observe and emulate their learning behaviors, and they keep a journal in which they record their observations about teaching and learning.

Study sessions are visited by a community mentor, who speaks about the particular discipline from the point of view of a practicing professional. At the end of the semester, community mentors and students are given information on pursuing further conta cts, such as student visits to the mentor's workplace.

Evaluation

All students enrolled in the 42 classes which offered Supplemental Instruction during the three years of the original project served as evaluation subjects. 765 students in these classes participated in Supplemental Instruction: 1,188 did not.

At the end of the project, profiles were drawn up for all students. These included age, gender, ethnicity, grade point averages, test scores, admissions status, credits attempted, retention rates, family income, parental education level, source of education funds, and marital, parenting, and disability status.

Analysis of these profiles showed that Supplemental Instruction participants and non- participants did not differ significantly in their demographic profiles. The two groups did differ significantly, however, in their fall-to-spring retention rates, th eir average grades and their course success rates. (Course success was defined as earning a grade of C or better, including Pass. Unsuccessful grades were D, F, Withdrawal, Withdrawal with Pass, and Withdrawal with F.)

Project Impact

Students who attended Supplemental Instruction sessions earned higher grades in the course--an overall mean grade of 2.7--than those who did not (1.8 grade average). The course success rate for project participants was 78 percent, versus 44 percent for non-participants. Participants had higher fall-to-spring retention rates than non-participants (86 percent versus 72 percent). The mean grade-point average for participants was 2.68, versus 2.24 for non-participants.

Students attended an average of eight Supplemental Instruction sessions per semester. There was no correlation between the number of sessions attended and the course grade. Students who attended the sessions rated them as being very helpful--4.6 on a Likert scale--and reported that they had received help in all the study and intellectual skills that the sessions had been designed to address. Students found contact with community mentors an effective way of connecting their academic work to their career aspirations.

Faculty mentors believed that the program allowed them to broaden their pedagogical expertise and their perspectives on student learning. They valued the opportunity to become learners again, gaining empathy for students and becoming familiar with a co lleague's discipline and teaching. As supervisors of student leaders they planned lessons, developed teaching materials, and came into close contact with outstanding students. And the overall process encouraged faculty to reflect on and discuss many different aspects of teaching.

Lessons Learned

Faculty interest in the mentor component of the project increased considerably when the College added faculty development to the institution's strategic plan. For faculty evaluation purposes, the College agreed to regard service as mentor as equivalent to earning one graduate credit. As a result, the project now has a core of fifteen faculty members who function as mentors.

Project Continuation and Recognition

The project has been fully institutionalized, and continues to thrive despite budget cuts. Data on student success and average grades are systematically collected and continue to confirm the success of the project s approach, even after grant funding e nded several years ago. The project has very recently received a second FIPSE grant to adapt this supplemental instruction program on four additional community college campuses.

The project has been presented at several national conferences, including the Annual Association of Community Colleges and Leadership 2000. The project director has assisted a number of community colleges in adapting the program, and has worked with th e Johns Hopkins University School of Continuing Studies to implement the faculty development component.

Available Information

Project materials (a manual, a videotape, and a collection of articles) may be obtained from:

Rosemary Wolfe
Education Department
Anne Arundel Community College
101 College Parkway
Arnold, MD 21012
401-541-2416

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