Advisors Are Selling, But Are Faculty Buying?Assessing Faculty Buy-in of an Early Academic Alert System

AbstractThe advising community recognizes the utility of an early academic alert system to provide students with the information and resources they need to ameliorate poor performance in their coursework. These alerts, however, must be initiated by faculty. This study assesses the usage rate of an early academic alert system by faculty at East Carolina University, a large, public university, and categorizes the most frequent users as those who are untenured or fixed term faculty members. Faculty users were surveyed to gauge faculty willingness to adopt this system, and the hypothesis that senior faculty are less likely to take advantage of new tools for interfacing with students and advisors is explored.

Background: Early Alert and Faculty UseEffective fall 2011, ECU implemented a new academic early alert tool (Starfish Retention Solutions™) and intervention process. This early alert system is designed to enhance dialogue among instructors, students, and advisors, and enhance teaching and learning. The system has been used heavily already, with a notable increase in the raising of Kudos flags to congratulate students on jobs well done:

MethodsNear the completion of fall 2012 semester, an 11 question electronic survey designed in Qualtrics was emailed to instructors who used Starfish during the academic semester. The survey remained open for two weeks with two reminder emails. The Starfish reporting system was used to generate a list of instructors who raised one or more flags per semester. Over the three-semester period studied, a range of 462 – 576 Starfish users per semester were classified by faculty rank:• Tenure-track and tenured faculty:

Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, or Full Professor• Fixed term faculty (typically on renewable annual contracts):

Instructor, Visiting Assistant Professor, Teaching Instructor, Lecturer, Teaching Assistant Professor, Teaching Associate Professor, Teaching Professor, Clinical Assistant Professor, Clinical Associate Professor, or Clinical Professor

Professional staff, medical and dental school faculty were excluded.Statistical analysis was performed with t-tests available in the Data Analysis add-in package in Microsoft Excel 2010. Reported p-values indicate confidence levels.

Allison Danell Johna FaulconerFaculty, Chemistry Faculty, EducationJayne Geissler Linda MellishUndergraduate Studies Student TransitionsJohn Trifilo Diane MajewskiStarfish Project Manager College Star

Mean percentage of university faculty by rank who raised flags via the Starfish academic alert system over a three-semester period. Error bars represent ± one standard deviation.

Notification Type

Fall 2011

Spring 2012

Fall 2012

Kudo 11,974 14,059 15,235Difficulty 12,513 11,215 10,980

Attendance 3,764 3,778 3,228Total 28,251 29,052 29,443

Survey ResultsOf the 697 instructors eligible to take part in this research, 202 instructors completed the survey for an overall response rate of 28%.

Faculty surveyed had similar attitudes about the utility of sending students either positive or negative flags. When asked if sending a Starfish notification to students was effective, the percentage of faculty who “Agreed “ or “Strongly Agreed” are:

Other notable survey results, by the numbers:• 85% felt raising a difficulty notification was just the beginning of a larger

conversation with a struggling student.• 50% indicated that sending an academic warning notification was less

awkward than a face-to-face conversation.• 81% thought that using Starfish was helpful to communicate since students

rarely visited the instructors’ offices.

Who Is Using Starfish?The largest proportion of any group of faculty to use the academic alert system is the fixed term faculty. The percentage of users at each rank decreases steadily as the rank becomes more senior, with the smallest percentage of users coming at the full professor rank. If tenure-track and tenured professor data are treated as aggregate (34.7±1.4%) and compared to the fixed term faculty data, the difference is significant at the 99% confidence level (p < 0.01).

The following encouraged me to use Starfish in my course:

I felt the following flags were effective:

0.0%

10.0%

20.0%

30.0%

40.0%

50.0% 44.7% 40.3%

34.5%28.7%

Perc

ent o

f ECU

Fac

ulty

Conclusions and ImplicationsStudent retention and graduation is a top priority among universities. Early academic alert systems have been cited as an important retention tool, however, only 1/3 to 1/2 of ECU faculty are Starfish users. Full faculty support is critical to improve faculty/student communication, inform students of academic progress, encourage students to seek tutoring and other support services, and, ultimately, support retention and graduation initiatives. This research indicates that sending Starfish notifications is effective and initiates communications with students. In addition, faculty use decreased as faculty rank increased. Several assumptions could be made:

• Faculty should be educated regarding the results of this research to encourage participation.

• Engaging the higher rank faculty to use an early academic alert system could be challenging. A review of research indicated that higher ranks (associate, full professor) may not only be older, but they have more invested in their careers and are accustomed to their current ways of working. (S.M. Crooks, Y. Yang, L.S. Duemer Faculty perceptions of web-based resources in higher education Journal of Educational Technology Systems, 31 (2) (2002–2003), pp. 102–113.)

• There is limited research on faculty regarding retention and early alert systems. In recent years, funding models and performance measures at colleges and universities have focused on retention and graduation rates.

• Faculty focus groups should be held to determine training needs, marketing (to faculty) strategies, and suggestions to improve the Starfish system.