Good Morning!
It’s week 10! The last week of the fall term! You can make it!
This week I’d like to send a virtual shout-out to all of the folks who run Welcome Week for our new freshmen at the beginning of the fall term. This four-day whirlwind is a logistical Cirque du Soleil of social and academic acclimation.
But in many ways, it’s really more of an orientational triage. There are certain things that the students have to know by the time classes start or they’ll tank right out of the gate. Then there are other things that we’d love them to learn but we know these things might be a bridge too far. In reality, four days isn’t a lot of time, and the students’ ability to digest information is undercut by all of the anxieties that come with knowing, “Holy crap, I start college in a few days!” So the Welcome Week design team is faced with a stark reality: be very clear about the difference between what these new students have to know and what would be nice to know. Then teach them all of the first category and as much of the second as possible – knowing that too much time spent on any of the “would be nice to know” could cut into the “have to know” and then we’ve got a potential problem.
A few years ago, I highlighted the ways that the Welcome Week team has used some simple assessment design principles to improve the quality of the experience. But in that post, we only had anecdotal data to suggest that some good things were happening as a result. Now that we have a couple years of quantitative data, the evidence is pretty clear: Welcome Week has gotten even better at doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
A few weeks after the beginning of the fall term, we ask freshmen to complete a short online survey to find out their perception of Welcome Week. Specifically, we want to know the degree to which they think they learned the things we tried to teach them. I’d like to highlight four items that represent things that we think students have to know. Below each item is the average response score on a 1-5 scale (1=strongly disagree and 5=strongly agree) from each of the last four years. Notice the steady improvement.
My Welcome Week experience . . .
. . . helped me learn exactly how to get to the location of my classes.
- 2013 – 3.55
- 2014 – 3.79
- 2015 – 4.18
- 2016 – 4.21
. . . helped me find places on campus where I can study most effectively.
- 2013 – 3.59
- 2014 – 3.63
- 2015 – 3.82
- 2016 – 4.00
. . . taught me specific ways to make the best use of my time during the school day.
- 2013 – 3.23
- 2014 – 3.39
- 2015 – 3.40
- 2016 – 3.68
. . . emphasized the importance of finding places on campus where I can take time for myself.
- 2013 – 3.51
- 2014 – 3.60
- 2015 – 3.69
- 2016 – 3.84
As you can see, the Welcome Week team deserves some well-earned praise. They’ve stuck to the overarching design and philosophy of the program and used evidence to inform change. They have redesigned several parts of the experience, revised the way that they train peer mentors, and tackled some difficult logistical challenges to ensure that our new students are more likely to be as ready as possible for the first day of classes. Equally difficult (and probably even more impressive), they’ve stopped doing a number of things – no matter how strongly they believed in the potential of those activities, in order to concentrate more precisely on making the most of every minute of those four days.
Late last week I was playing with our freshly-collected freshman data from the end of the first term to see if we could see any lasting effects of the Welcome Week experience. As you might expect, the impact of Welcome Week tends to fade as subsequent fall term experiences become more influential in driving student success. However, one particularly gratifying finding popped when I tested whether any of the Welcome Week survey items might predict our students’ response to an item in the end of the first term survey, “Welcome Week provided the start I needed to succeed academically at Augustana.” Even though the data collected from the Welcome Week survey was gathered during the second week of the term and the end of the first term data was collected during weeks seven and eight, the item “My Welcome Week experience taught me specific ways to make the best use of my time during the school day,” proved to be a statistically significant positive predictor of our freshmen’s perception of the preparatory effectiveness of Welcome Week. Impressively, this is also one of the learning goals where the Welcome Week team seems to have made substantial strides in preparing our new students to succeed.
So congratulations to everyone involved in putting together and pulling off Welcome Week! I hope you’ll take a moment to send a kudos to anyone you know, even yourself, who contributed to a great Welcome Week way back at the beginning of the term.
Make it a good day,
Mark