Hello colleagues,
Supplemental Instruction has attempted to address the motivation factor that Jered brings up. There's are also quite a number of dissertations on SI that try to control for the motivation factor by comparing outcomes of students who expressed interest in coming but were unable to make the times offered versus those who expressed interest and did attend.
The main website is umkc.edu/cad/si. There used to be a link to a number of dissertations. Forgive me, but I did not come across it this time.
One early resource from ERIC is http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED457797; another reference might be this annotated bibliography by David Arendale, presenter at the Kellogg Institute. http://www.arendale.org/home/2012/12/5/annotated-bibliography-science-related-publicaitons-involvin.html
All the best,
Jane Neuburger
Director, TSC Syracuse University
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Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2014 06:41:12 +0000
From: Laura Symons <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Motivation vs Academic Success
Sara,
In Skip Downing's "On Course" I found a formula that apparently has been around for a while: Motivation = Value X Expectation of Success. I have found that students who are aware of the formula can work with tutors or academic coaches, etc. to figure out how to up the value or up the expectation of success, thereby taking responsibility for their own learning on yet another level. That metacognition stuff really works!
Best,
Laura
________________________________________
From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Sara Weertz [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, January 10, 2014 6:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Motivation vs Academic Success
Jered,
I think we're both saying the same thing but in different ways. As a program analyst by trade, however, I would never use the terms "believe" or for that matter "prove our worth" when talking about evaluating the efforts of academic support. And I'm not so sure that our mission should be to "convincingly document and, ideally, quantify the help we provide...." End-of-the-year evaluations are, more or less, summative evaluations that analyze expected program outcomes in an effort to "sum up" program results. An evaluation's means to an end is to make recommendations for continuous program improvement. If you feel you did not meet your program goals, recommendations should indicate how you're going to try to do better.
Second, I didn't raise the question about motivation. Marcia did, implying that motivation is part and parcel of student academic success. Though I do believe that students who self-select have a greater sense of self-efficacy, which can be construed as more motivated to learn and thus more apt to be academically successful, as a learning specialist, I can't do much with that.
I don't rule out motivation, but even if we were to discover certain traits complement higher levels of motivation, how does this help me or the student? On one hand, motivation is not part of our admissions standards; on the other, I can't change the student who is lacking. I can, however, train SI leaders and tutors to be role models and to offer the best possible assistance. I then have to sit back and hope the student takes me up on the offer. Change comes from within...and it's not an overnight process.
sal
Sara Weertz, M.Ed.
Executive Director, First Year Experience
ASU Station #10915
Angelo State University
San Angelo, TX 76909
(325) 942-2595
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CRLA President-Elect 2013-2014
www.crla.net
-----Original Message-----
From: Open Forum for Learning Assistance Professionals [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jered Wasburn-Moses
Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2014 10:46 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Motivation vs Academic Success
Sara,
First, let's be clear: I'm pretty sure that all of us here *believe* that academic supports help students, or we wouldn't be here. (Not that you were asserting otherwise--I just want to make sure we make that baseline explicit, because there have been misinterpretations on this listserv in the past!) The question is how to convincingly document and, ideally, quantify the help that we provide, so that we can "prove our worth" to skeptical penny-pinching administrators. ;-)
Second, I'm wondering if we are talking past each other a little bit. You ask if the goal of academic support is to motivate students or to help them achieve. But I (and I assume Marcia) am not talking about any increase in motivation that might result from our interventions. Rather, I am talking about the fact that there probably is an important characteristic difference between students who use opt-in services and those who do not; for lack of a better term, I'll call it "motivation," though "self-advocacy" or "self-efficacy" might be equally appropriate.
Students who opt-in to academic services probably have greater "motivation" than those who do not. It is *also* reasonable to believe that "motivation" is strongly correlated to student academic success. Thus, it is a reasonable hypothesis that any greater success demonstrated by participants in opt-in programs versus non-participants is really due to higher "motivation" in those students, rather than to any particular effectiveness of the services. (In statistics they sometimes call this a "lurking variable": some unmeasured entity affecting both the independent and dependent variables, creating correlation without direct causation between them.)
In other words, maybe it is the case that an SI program (or tutoring program, or Early Alert program, or...) is really very good at attracting students who ultimately will be successful in college, due to personal characteristics and possibly in spite of their group characteristics. Then students who participate in this program will obviously do better than other students, regardless of the intervention itself!
So, the question still remains, how do we--or, indeed, can we--rule out this "motivation" hypothesis, or account for it in some way, to measure the actual effectiveness of a particular intervention?
Jered Wasburn-Moses
Math Center Coordinator
Success Skills Coordinator
Learning Assistance Programs
Northern Kentucky University
http://lap.nku.edu
University Center 170F
(859) 572-5779
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