By Daily Press staff
Aspecial Santa Monica College program designed to encourage students to complete their coursework, improve their grades and stay in school has won a national award.
The National Council of Student Development, an affiliate of the American Association of Community Colleges, gave the 2003 “Best Practice Award” to SMC’s Student Success Project, citing its effectiveness, quality, significance to the field and adaptability of strategies to other colleges.
“We’re proud to have received this award,” counselor Esau Tovar said. “We’ve worked hard over the past few years to design strategies that will keep students in college and on a path of success. We hope our program can be a model for other colleges.”
The program was formally started in fall 1999 and has included about 850 students, all first-time freshmen, who were randomly chosen over its four-year history. Follow-up studies have shown: ■Approximately 90 percent of all the students in the program successfully completed their courses, compared to an overall rate of 68 percent of first-time SMC students. ■Students in the program had higher grade point averages than the SMC student population at large — 2.46 versus 2.35. ■Eighty percent of students in the program stayed in school the next semester, compared to 53 percent of the first-time student population at large. ■Twenty-eight percent of the students in the program went on academic probation, compared to 35 percent of first-time freshmen campuswide.
Tovar said the probationary rate, though lower than the campus at large, was still of great concern. Consequently, the program is now focusing its attention on probationary students.
The program employed a variety of strategies, including: ■Tutoring. ■Extended new student orientations, generally eight-or four-hour sessions, compared to the typical two-hour session. The sessions included ice breakers, role playing and more extensive academic counseling. ■Orientation sessions that also included “significant others,” such as parents, siblings, boyfriends and girlfriends. ■Close tracking of students’ academic progress by counselors, with extensive follow-up individual counseling throughout the semester. ■The involvement of professors, mostly English and math, who worked with the counselors and incorporated collaborative learning techniques in the classroom, assessed student learning and worked with first-time students to maximize their success. ■Extracurricular activities such as social events, theater excursions (linked to classroom material) and informal gatherings.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on May 21, 2003. Read the original PDF.