1.3.4 Designing an Academic Skills Center

Most colleges and universities offer some type of learning assistance outside the traditional classroom. Although the assistance may vary widely in name, structure, and offerings, the key objective is to increase student learning and success. It is important to position a learning center so that it aligns with an institution’s goals and missions, to provide ongoing assessment, and to collect meaningful data in order to assure the center’s effectiveness and reputation among stakeholders.

Role of Academic Skills Centers

Academic skills centers gained great popularity in the eighties for several reasons: there was an expectation that out-of-class assistance would bolster students’ success and increase institutional effectiveness; there was a need for institutions to keep pace with their competitors; and such centers provided a concrete response to requests for assistance to students, many of whom were underprepared for college-level academic work (1.1.3 Efforts to Transform Higher Education). In subsequent years the role of academic skills centers was further reinforced by a paradigm shift from teaching to student learning (Arendale, 1997). Martha Maxwell identifies fourteen services offered by many centers; they include academic evaluation and diagnostic testing; programs to improve study skills and learning strategies; peer tutoring and/or professional tutoring; supplemental instruction (SI), or course-related, systematic, and highly structured group tutoring; computer assisted instruction and other educational technology; developmental courses (for credit and non-credit); faculty services; publicity and public relations; informing college administrators about the program; staff training; referral services; counseling; advising; and evaluation. Most centers fulfill a large number of these functions, although the expressions, functions, and terminology characterizing the services may differ.

A successful academic skills center must align with the needs of the students in supporting an institution’s vision and mission, and it must assess its effectiveness in its early days of operation. It may seem to take an inordinate amount of time and effort to practice assessment, especially during the early days of a center’s operations when so many details are vying for attention; but in order to ensure continuing support from stakeholders, it is critical to answer the following kinds of questions: What is the number of students not being retained, and at what point do students drop out? What academic areas or courses seem to be more problematic for the students? What is the success rate in subsequent courses? What is the rate of graduation or completion? (1.3.2 Academic Strategic Planning—The Basics).

Achieving synergy between multiple service units presents its own challenges. If the goal is to bring all student services into one area, personnel currently providing those services may have trouble adjusting to a modified work environment. In this case, it may be helpful for an academic skills center to form a board comprised of faculty, staff, administrators, and student leaders to help integrate center activities, advertise the services of the center, and offer concrete suggestions for improving operations.

Institutional Commitment

In many community colleges, underprepared students comprise a large percentage of the beginning class. This includes rural settings where there are often a large number of first-generation college students, and urban settings where there are often minority populations. In both populations, adult learners are prevalent, and special assistance is needed to bridge the gap between the cessation of formal education in previous years and recent engagement in college academics. Many experts would agree with Vincent Tinto that an institution is obligated to educate the students it admits, echoing a philosophy by Alexander Astin (1985) which holds that “by admitting underprepared students the institution has implicitly agreed to provide whatever education programs and services are necessary to help them reach their degree objectives.” Robert McCabe (2000) emphasizes that “Each [underprepared] student who is denied opportunity for educational growth is a national resource lost.” The task of providing appropriate opportunity for all underperforming students clearly extends beyond traditional classroom instruction to additional assistance and reinforcement, which an academic skills center can offer.

Tutorial services are not the sum total of the needs of underprepared students (McCabe, 2003). Many high-risk students have a number of personal needs that can distract them from working toward their educational goals. Although an institutional research office may not be able to produce data indicating the nature and depth of personal needs, these issues nonetheless impact students’ academic performance. If counseling services are neither housed in the academic skills center nor structured administratively as a component of the center, collaboration between the academic skills center and counseling services at the college should be established. Similar collaboration for referrals should be initiated between the academic skills center and disability support services, since many underprepared students struggle, often unknowingly, with a learning disability.

Benchmarking

Best practices should be the foundation for all services offered students. The Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS) (2003) acknowledges that learning assistance programs may vary but should all ascribe to common goals, such as ensuring that the program is student-centered; helping students become personally responsible and accountable for their own learning; assisting students in developing positive attitudes toward learning, and building their confidence in their own ability to learn; providing instructional approaches that address cognitive, affective, and socio-cultural areas of learning for a diverse student population; offering resources and services to assist faculty, staff, and administrators in their teaching and professional development; and supporting the institution’s academic standards and requirements. Table 1 illustrates some of the programs benchmarked by Robert McCabe in Yes We Can! A community college guide for developing America’s underprepared (2003).

College personnel designing an academic skills center may understandably wish to offer all programs and services proven to advance student success. However, it may be more realistic to begin with a program that addresses students’ most urgent needs and that lends itself to successful management. As the program proves its success, the institution can add other components. One can gain further information and insights about the components and daily operations of successful centers by visiting websites and by making onsite visits to academic skills centers that have both quantitative and qualitative data to support claims of effectiveness.

Generating Support

Funding is a key factor determining the comprehensiveness of a center. One must delineate documented needs and a plan for effectiveness. Creators of the proposed plan must show that many segments of the student population would benefit, not just underprepared students. An academic skills center can further strengthen its case by using the goals and mission of a college or university as its underpinnings. External funding options include various state or federal grants, TRIO, Carl Perkins, etc. Another funding source may be a large corporation enmeshed in the community. Some colleges and universities levy a student technology fee for funding the technology component of a center. Student activity fees, generally under the auspices of the dean of students, or collaborative funding with specific departments, can impose constraints on center operations. Ideally, an academic skills center is allotted its own institutional budget.

Piloting/Initiating the Plan

Once an institution decides on the focus of its center and the availability of staff, space, funding, and other commitments of support, the administrator of the center then collaborates with the appropriate persons to configure the space and to pair it with program offerings; to hire personnel who are capable of overseeing various aspects; and to plan the system of check-in, arrangement of appointments with tutors, and so on.

Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that students will use academic skill centers. Moderately successful students who are confident enough to venture into unknown territory will be more likely to take advantage of the tutorial services than underprepared students, many of whom have mastered the art of denying or ignoring academic weaknesses. Therefore it is essential to make creative plans to persuade academically needy students to take advantage of the services available. One option is to work with faculty to offer incentives to students who use the services; another is to work with leaders of student organizations. The smooth day-to-day operation of the center is equally critical to its success. The key administrator of the center may wish to establish weekly meetings with staff and to meet with various program directors. Feedback from student users should be a major component of these discussions. A myriad of issues will inevitably arise during the first couple of weeks of each term, but a confident, prepared staff can meet all challenges professionally and serve students successfully.

Marketing the Center

The home page of the institution’s web site is an excellent place to begin announcing and promoting the center. Essential material can be posted to communicate to students and others key information about the center, such as its location, the services offered, the days and hours of operation, the staff available, the check-in process, etc. In collaboration with academic departments and counseling, the center’s administrator might request that the institution’s webmaster provide links to other areas, for example, from the English department’s web page to the academic skills center’s web page, to direct students to the types of assistance in the center related to the English department.

One way to remind students constantly, and in print form, of the services available to them is to include a statement about the center on course syllabi and policy sheets. Of course it is important to do this with the prior authority from the appropriate administrator. Another possibility is to circulate flyers on campus that include information about the learning center’s location, hours of operation, and services offered. Featuring the center in the local city and campus newspapers attracts other potential clients, and announcing the services of the center on radio or television further advances the cause as savvy parents learn of the opportunities. Partnering with the public relations department provides a double benefit by maximizing the return for expenditures and announcing a vital service to the community.

Gauging Effectiveness

Because academic skills centers differ so widely in their services, evaluative efforts must be customized to fit the varied designs of the centers. However, if the institution’s office of institutional research is engaged from the outset to provide and interpret data, the center should have ongoing, consistent data by which to gauge the effectiveness of the services offered (1.5.2 Methodology for Designing a Program Assessment System and 1.5.4 Writing Performance Criteria for a Program).

In larger academic skills centers, such as the Learning Center of the University of Texas, each of the various components of the center conducts its own program effectiveness study. In many colleges and universities, however, the task of gathering and interpreting data is assigned to the office of institutional research. Nonetheless, the center itself must provide data and inquiries so that the institutional effectiveness personnel will know what information is desired and how to proceed. Ideally, a center assigns a set of evaluative measures and results for each component of its operations, such as the tutorial center, the disability support services, and learning communities. Student surveys are a good data source if they are streamlined and direct, and if the evaluator has the option of remaining anonymous. A design as simple as a Likert scale can provide helpful insights.

It is extremely important to get feedback from faculty and staff. Weekly meetings of the center’s staff provide information at one level. Feedback from outside faculty can be even more revealing as faculty and deans assess the appropriateness of the various services offered and share their perception of effectiveness. Astin (1991) suggests the “collegial model” of assessment, “in which faculty and staff colleagues play a significant part in all phases of the assessment process.” Astin’s model implies an assessment system that is far more sophisticated than locally generated surveys or questionnaires; yet his principle of involving key stakeholders in all processes of assessment is an important reminder.

Concluding Thoughts

The motto of the National Association of Developmental Education (NADE) summarizes how far-reaching an academic skills center can be in its aspirations: “helping underprepared students prepare, prepared students advance, and advanced students excel.” It is an ongoing challenge for centers to have the kind of credibility, cultural understanding, and support so that the students who can most benefit are the ones who utilize the services. A second challenge is to find ways to strengthen measurable evidence that use of the center’s services has resulted in the demonstrable preparedness of the respective kinds of target students, that they have successfully advanced, and that the advanced students have performed in a way that exceeds expectations. For those who need to prepare, centers must provide solid evidence of success in core entry-level courses. For those who are prepared, centers must demonstrate that grade points have improved, that the level of persistence is greater than the norm, and that these students have succeeded in courses that were dependent upon the courses in which they were receiving help. And centers must also provide evidence that the study skills learned in the center result in the transferability of knowledge and skills from one course to another. If learning skills centers can provide solid measures giving evidence that appropriate use of the center results in the achievement of identifiable goals for student success, both credibility of centers and usage by students should increase. Ideally students will enjoy greater success in learning and will grow in their valuing of learning.

References

Arendale, D. (1997). NADE News: Learning centers for the 21ST century. Journal of Developmental Education, 20, (3).

Astin, A. W. (1991). Assessment for excellence. New York: Macmillan.

Astin, A. W. (1985). Achieving educational excellence. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Astin, A. W. (2001). What matters in college? Four critical years revisited. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Boylan, H. R. (2002). What works: Research-based best practices in developmental education. Continuous Quality Improvement Network with the National Center for Developmental Education, Appalachian State University.

Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (CAS). (2003). CAS Learning Assistance Program Standards and Guidelines. Washington, DC: Author.

McCabe, R. H. (2000). No one to waste: A report to public decision-makers and community college leaders. Washington, DC: The American Association of Community Colleges.

McCabe, R. H. (2003). Yes, we can! A community college guide for developing America’s underprepared. Washington, DC: Community College Press.

Roueche, J. E., & Roueche, S. D. (1999). High stakes, high performance: Making remedial education work. Washington, DC: Community College Press.

Tinto, V. (1994). Leaving college: Rethinking the causes and cures of student attrition. IL: University of Chicago Press.

University of Texas Learning Center. <http://www.utexas.edu/student/utlc/>