When Pierce College started to give its instructors more data on how their students were doing, it changed how some faculty members teach and improved their understanding of their students’ experience.
Tom Broxson, the Washington State community college’s dean of natural sciences and math, teaches an online geography course. He saw in the data dashboards that the proportion of students passing his course had dropped from his long-term average, about 80 percent, to just 65 percent in the most recent two years. He looked at his gradebook and found that more students were dropping out in the first week, and then he brainstormed with other faculty members about a possible cause.
Frustration over grading discrepancies inspired an experiment that is earning a community college national attention.
That’s when he discovered that the higher dropout rate coincided with a change in the learning-management system used by the college. Students weren’t familiar with the new system, he theorized, and some were getting overwhelmed in the first week. He changed the display so that students could see only two weeks of assignments at one time, which helped the students adjust and lowered the dropout rate.
Paul Gerhardt, a Pierce business professor who chairs the department, learned from the dashboards that African-American students were far less likely than other students to successfully complete his course on human relations. In 2015-16, he looked into the research, and decided that personalized attention might make a difference.
Mr. Gerhardt, who received a $2,000 raise as an incentive to use the dashboard data in a classroom research project, began calling on African-American students more often, and addressing them by name. He also tried to get all students more engaged by using a teaching method that focuses on facilitating small-group discussions about a problem or idea. Those efforts led to nearly 81 percent of African-American students completing the class with a 2.0 or better, compared with a completion rate of just 60 percent in previous quarters.
This year, through a second program that will net him another $2,500 increase in salary, he will conduct an in-depth study of what helps African-American men succeed in the classroom. He hopes to create a documentary featuring students who have graduated from college and put it on YouTube.
“The dashboards are telling me that I’m doing a lot of things right,” Mr. Gerhardt says. “Hopefully I can take that to the next level.”
