Designing a Program to Help Students Thrive
It has been my observation that high-achieving and strongly motivated students are as susceptible as other students to difficulties, academic or otherwise, that can influence their academic progress as well as their overall persistence in college. Thus it was clear to me when I began my position as director of the new university honors program at Indiana University Southeast that the program would need to be intentional. In other words, we would have to concern ourselves not simply with recruiting and admitting students, but with knowing these students well enough to anticipate troubles they might encounter and the services they might need. My hope, and the hope of the members of the school’s
administration and Honors Council, was that we could design a program that would prosper by helping its students thrive.
Assessment as a Means of Learning about Characteristics of Our Students
We survey our students repeatedly through the year and try to respond to what we learn in these surveys. Surveying students, whether with Noel-Levitz tools such as the College Student Inventory (CSI) and Student Satisfaction inventory (SSI), or with Qualtrics or Survey Monkey surveys we’ve designed and administered in house, has helped take the pulse of our students, both individually and as a cohort. More importantly, it has helped us to attend to current challenges and to anticipate future ones.
Many of our new honors students suffer from Imposter Syndrome. They think that their previous successes have occurred because people liked them, or because nobody was smart enough to figure out their (many) hidden weaknesses. They are sure that college, or the honors program, will be the place where their flaws will be discovered and where they will be humiliated. For example, we lost a first-year student, a young woman who had graduated from high school at seventeen. In high school she made excellent grades while also being a star on her school’s varsity cross country team, served as a youth leader in her church, and earned her pilot’s license at the age of sixteen.
Why did this student leave the honors program? She thought that the students in the
program were too smart and motivated for her, and that we had made a mistake in selecting her to join us. The basis for this decision was her experience at a three-hour retreat in August for honors students—a retreat intended to help students get acquainted with each other and reduce their anxiety about the upcoming school year. It is ironic that such a bright and capable student would have been intimidated by her colleagues at our retreat, and it underscores how insecure a great many of our students are. Sadly, we had not yet
administered the CSI before she panicked and left the program. I have no idea of what sort of issues the CSI would have revealed, but I hope I would have been able to assist her in overcoming her fears.
This incident, along with other information we’ve learned from the CSI, has motivated us to revamp our August retreat. For instance, the Summary and Planning Report revealed high scores on receptiveness to help, and low scores on receptiveness to different points of view (i.e., Opinion Tolerance). This indicated that our students are willing to receive help and that they need to learn how to perceive alternate viewpoints as worthy of consideration, rather than as a threat to their world view or their self-image.
To address students’ receptiveness to help, as well as their guardedness with their
colleagues during the retreat, we will break into small interest groups over the course of our morning together. Some students will take part in a discussion of the novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog, while new student mentors and mentees will meet each other in another room and begin the process of getting to know each other. In a third room, returning honors’ students will learn about the differences between our research and service projects, in order to decide which service project will work best for their interests and academic goals. It is our hope that spending time in small, interactive groups will help lessen the sense that they are in competition with their honors’ program colleagues, and encourage them to see each other as reasonable, interesting people.
Developing Sessions in Response to Students Interests and Needs
During the second hour of our retreat, one of our three breakout sessions will be called “College (and Honors) 101: How to Thrive in College, Earn Your Degree and Kudos, and Leave Happily.” It will be moderated by me and the director of Personal Counseling Services, as well as by me. We hope that our students will know more about the resources (academic; personal; financial; career)—areas indicated as points of need or receptivity through the CSI—that we have on campus, as well as how to gain access to them, by the end of this hour. I also hope that our newest students will comprehend that I am their advocate, coach, teacher, and cheerleader. I would like them to be confident to come to me for help and that I will do my best for them.
As a follow-up, we will administer the CSI to every student enrolled in an honors class at the beginning of both semesters this year, and will once again design or modify our supplementary programming in response to what we find out about this group of students during the academic year.
Referrals to Relevant Services
Last year, for example, we found out that students were concerned about a number of things, including choosing their majors, applying to graduate schools, looking for first jobs, and actually financing their education at Indiana University Southeast. In response, we offered a series of workshops, led by members of Career Services, Financial Aid, and the Academic Success Center, as well as the academic advising staff, to help meet these
students’ needs. Because our students have such varied schedules, some of these workshops were offered multiple times, at different times of the day and week, to maximize student attendance. In addition, I made use of the information I’d gained from the CSI to make sure that I sent individual notes to those students, encouraging them to attend a relevant session.
Making a Difference in the Lives of Individual Students: Interventions for
Personal, Educational and Financial Stress
The CSI results also revealed what seem to be more immediate, pressing problems. Through conversations with students following my receipt of the CSI results, I learned about an eighteen-year-old student without parental support, who was supporting her high-school-aged sibling while attending school and working long hours. We connected this student with the financial aid offices. The director assisted her through the process of declaring herself legally and financially independent of her parents. As a result, this dropped her Expected Family Contribution (EFC) considerably and helped her to afford school and work fewer hours. I suspect that she will be able to maintain her emotional, intellectual, and financial energy more effectively now that her financial worries have been partially
addressed, and that she is on course to complete her undergraduate education in a timely fashion.
A colleague recently told me about a student affairs meeting, during which the director of Personal Counseling Services reported a busy 2008-09 academic year, despite not
advertising his office’s services. He then attributed a good portion of his office’s activity to a steady influx of honors students. When someone jokingly hazarded a guess that this is because honors students are typically high-stress and high-maintenance (as possibly
indicated in their high scores to Educational Stress and Receptivity to Personal Counseling), he replied that the honors program is unlike many honors program and is atypically
proactive in connecting students to counseling services. Our ability to do this is the direct result of receiving CSI results early in the semester, which allows me to arrange meetings with students in my office within two weeks of reading those results and encourage them to connect with counseling services. I have even dialed Counseling Services’ extension and left my office to give students privacy during those times when students seemed receptive to receiving help but have acknowledged that they are unlikely to follow through with making that initial call. Some students who have been referred to counseling still report high levels of anxiety and distress; however, none of them has yet left the honors program, or Indiana University Southeast.
Early Intervention and Student Success through Awareness and Adaptation
As mentioned earlier, we augment our CSI findings with the results of SSI surveys and other surveys administered through Qualtrics and Survey Monkey in order to assess a number of issues. We want to know how satisfied our students are with their overall experiences at Indiana University Southeast and in the honors program, as well as their experiences in honors classes while those classes are going on. While course evaluations can point out strengths and weaknesses in a class, they do so at or near the end of the semester, giving the faculty member no chance to modify policies or the quality of
interaction with students at the time such action would be most useful. What we prefer to do is understand how students feel about class a few weeks into the semester, and a few weeks before the semester ends. The latter survey is meant to tell us if the interventions we enacted had a positive effect upon students’ experience in the course.
Of course, surveys do not do much except keep students busy if the results aren’t examined, analyzed, and discussed, whether for clarification or for brainstorming. I look at results,
along with our office assistant, Rebekah Dement Farmer, a recent alumna of Indiana University Southeast who has a nice rapport with our students as well a solid memory of what it is like to be a student here. She often offers interesting perspectives. Many times she has suggested that I might be overly concerned about a particular classroom issue, or that I might be wise to intervene with a specific student. Her insight has helped me find a center for each problem we encounter.
Neither Rebekah nor I can solve all our students’ problems, answer all their concerns, or smooth their paths through particular classes, honors or otherwise; however, the steady flow of information we receive, whether through surveys, informal interactions, comments from colleagues, observations in class, or scheduled office meetings, at least keeps us aware of issues we might otherwise miss and helps us to adapt to what we’ve learned.
Faculty Development
I have found through survey results and conversations that there is sometimes a mismatch between faculty and student expectations. Some faculty have expressed disappointment that some honors students are not as adventurous as they had hoped, nor as articulate and polished as they had imagined. For their part, biology majors have been stung by what they perceived to be a tongue-lashing for not knowing MLA format, which is not an academic format used by biology majors. Some students also felt panicked in upper-level
multidisciplinary seminars outside of their field because their professors assumed that every student had some familiarity with his or her academic specialty.
Learning about these mismatches, I have revised our faculty retreat format by bringing honors students and faculty members together for part of the retreat, so that both can compare their hopes and expectations for the year, as well as to clarify that both parties will need to understand and negotiate their expectations. After all, a junior biology major is not a literary scholar, although he certainly can be taught to begin thinking and writing like one, and a sophomore English major may need a few weeks of background readings and discussions before she is able to absorb the political and historical origins of genocide. She may not, in fact, even start the semester with a solid knowledge of the definition of
genocide.
The point is not to coddle students, but to help make sure that faculty members and students have somewhat realistic view of each other, of each other’s expectations, and of what is likely to be accomplished in the course of a semester or year. At the very least, students and faculty member can acknowledge that they have been heard, which I suspect is far better for everyone’s morale and disposition. When a faculty member knows from the outset that he/she will either have to spend time explaining MLA format or to permit students to write in their “home” academic styles, he/she is less likely to be frustrated or surprised when this fact manifests itself. For their part, when students know beforehand that there are materials about genocide in the honors program library, they are likely to familiarize themselves with those materials and walk into the first day of their class with a passing knowledge of the concept, and be able to jump into the course readings and discussions actively, rather than with trepidation.
Enriching the Minds and Educations of Our Students through Supportive
and Challenging Environments
Members of the Indiana University Southeast Honors Program tend to be intelligent, opinionated, articulate, and ambitious. They’re generally the sorts of students that faculty members would love to work with. They are not, however, immune to the insecurities and difficulties of life that beset almost all of us from time to time. They may be traumatized by divorce, afraid to fail their calculus class, responsible for their own children, tripped up by obsessive compulsive disorder, or working full time while also taking fifteen hours of classes. While they are certainly ambitious and intelligent, these students are as vulnerable to difficulties as anyone else. It is our hope that the courses in our Honors Program will enrich the minds and educations of our students, while our attentiveness to students’ other needs will also provide them with the environment they need in which to thrive as human beings.
