What Do Students Really Think?

The College: El Paso Community College in El Paso, Texas

The Difficulty: EPCC is implementing several institutional policy changes that will reshape the entering student experience:

• mandatory enrollment in developmental education and EPCC’s student success course for students who test into dev ed
• a new case-management advising system, which includes a mentoring component

While the college is confident these changes will improve student success, administrators want to fully understand how the changes will affect students, so they can minimize any negative impact and keep students from becoming discouraged.

The Expert: Arleen Arnsparger is a consultant for the University of Texas at Austin’s Community College Leadership Program. “We tend to make assumptions about why students behave in certain ways or what their experiences are with the college,” Arleen says. “We’re all getting better at making decisions by looking at institutional data and survey data, rather than just anecdotal information. Colleges have a lot of numbers to point them in the right direction, but student focus groups help them dig a little deeper into what they’re seeing in the data.”

The Accomplishment: Shirley Gilbert, EPCC’s program director for the Developmental Education Initiative, saw Arleen’s presentations at Achieving the Dream Strategy Institutes and was impressed by her ability to capture and convey the student voice. EPCC invited Arleen to come to campus and lead a workshop about creating student focus groups. Arleen helped participants identify what they needed to know about students’ experiences and then find the right questions to ask. The workshop also covered the logistics of creating a student focus group, including recruitment of focus group members, designing a discussion guide, and reporting findings to the college. She concluded with a model focus group session.

What Really Worked: The workshop participants left with a better understanding of how to involve students in decision-making; many faculty and staff have gone on to host their own student focus groups. “EPCC leaves no stone unturned in understanding the student experience,” Arleen says.

Lasting Effects: El Paso Community College is getting ready to roll out additional student focus groups, but is planning to bring Arleen back to give the college a boost as it moves forward, especially since the focus groups will involve a larger number of staff this time around. “We’ve scratched the surface, but now we need to get a deeper understanding,” Shirley Gilbert says. “We asked our students, ‘Tell me what you think,’ and now we need to ask, ‘Tell me what you really think.’”

Alyson Zandt is a Program Associate at MDC.