Student progress reporting is designed to assist in communicating academic performance to students and academic advisers during the semester. This allows faculty, students and advisers to evaluate academic performance and discuss appropriate actions. Alerting students to their progress at critical periods can allow solutions to be developed to student problems such as absenteeism, missed assignments, and low test scores, enable early intervention for at-risk students, and encourage use of existing resources to promote beneficial, evidence-based interventions.

Procedure:

During week three of the semester faculty will be invited to complete an Early Indicators survey to alert students to behavior that should change or continue. The Early Indicators report helps students make adjustments early enough in the semester to be successful. Feedback does not necessarily report on graded work. Rather, it can be based on indicators that a student might or might not be appropriately engaged in the course. These indicators vary by course, but examples include regular attendance, responding to questions or participating in discussions, turning in assignments, etc.

During week seven, faculty will be invited to complete a Mid-Semester Progress survey, which should be based on both patterns of student behavior and graded work. This survey will include a flag “In Danger of Earning Below a C” which faculty can use to alert students that they are in danger of earning below a “C” grade in the course. The Mid-Semester report helps students realistically assess their progress in a course. Some significant graded work should be included in this assessment of student progress. Feedback should be provided to students in time for them to gather additional information before making decisions about their continued enrollment in the course.

Faculty will receive an email message from Starfish with instructions and a link to progress surveys for the course sections included in the survey. Each course section is presented as a grid. Faculty can check the appropriate box next to the student’s name for whom progress is being reported. Faculty can choose to add comments and can save progress.

Students and their assigned academic advisers receive automatically generated messages and instructor comments once a progress survey is submitted.

Students who receive messages indicating a warning flag about academic performance are expected to take action. They should contact the instructor, TA, or academic adviser to seek additional information and discuss appropriate actions.

If a student receives multiple warning flags, the assigned adviser is also expected to contact the student and document that effort.

The tracking area allows advisers and faculty to monitor student response to academic warnings. When a student meets with an instructor or adviser, information can be added to the tracking item in several ways:

• Comment – add additional information
• Clear – mark the flag as addressed
• Close the loop – send a message to the flag raiser with the reasons the flag is being cleared

Typically, all three actions may be taken by an adviser or instructor who meets with a student responding to a flag.

All active flags will be cleared at the end of each semester, but record of the flag will always be visible in the student’s folder.

Starfish allows faculty and advisers to provide feedback to students at any time of the semester. Senate Policy 47-20 says faculty should provide evaluations of student progress in advance of the late-drop deadline in order for students to make an informed decision about ways to improve their performance or, as a last option, to late drop the course. In addition to the feedback provided in week three and week seven, faculty should consider providing feedback during the week prior to the late-drop deadline, especially for those students in danger of earning below a “C”.