A primary goal of educators is to positively influence student learning and help ensure students go on to achieve successful careers. What’s more, improving student success also means improving student retention rates. This is simultaneously vital to the long-term health of institutions and appeases administrations.
It’s important to know when faculty are doing the right things, so faculty can replicate the results with current and future students. While having data on student retention rates and what qualifies students as at risk are both important, these metrics tend to be reactionary to student performances. To improve student success and keep retention rates high, institutions should use data in a more proactive manner that creates immediate impact. This is easily accomplished with student assessment data.
Using an assessment software to gather student performance data beyond a static exam score is an easy way to accomplish this. There is nothing that can’t be evaluated using the robust information received from each and every assessment. The best part? It doesn’t matter if this is something you’ve never done at your institution or if you’re a long-time user who has yet to use the in-depth exam data. Whether you’re starting from scratch or retroactively mining assessment data, it’s a process that can be easily implemented through basic exam item mapping.
Review the four ways faculty and admins can put data to good use to improve student success and raise retention rates.
Influence Curricular Decision-Making
Are you looking to maximize the effectiveness of your program? Implementing a curricular change and want to know if the new curriculum is working? Looking for gaps and/or redundancy in your curriculum? Understanding how your curriculum is performing is vital to student success, which improves student retention. Simply by administering exams on a regular basis, you have data you need to understand the effectiveness of the curriculum and influence curricular decision-making. With a complete digital assessment platform, faculty and admins can automatically collect and organize the information at the click of a button.
Evaluate Teaching Methods
There’s nothing like delivering a great lesson in class. Students are energized and confident they have a grasp on what was just taught, and you feel great that you successfully planned and implemented a lesson that engaged students. What’s better than that? How about knowing the lesson was a success with performance data. Being proactive about using the statistics already at your disposal can help identify which lessons and teaching methods are truly most effective in improving student success.
Empower Student Self-Awareness and Exam Preparation
Collecting in-depth student assessment data benefits more than just administration and faculty. By mapping exam items to more specific content areas contained within an exam, students receive vital information that allows them to be more self-aware of their preparation and performance. Providing students with timely feedback about their performance data empowers them to proactively improve their exam preparation, understand their individual strengths and weaknesses across any topic, and ultimately improve how well they do on their exams.
Prepare Students for Entrance and Licensure Exams
The ultimate evaluation of any educational program is the success of its students on board or licensure exams. To best prepare students for these exams, it is imperative that program effectiveness be evaluated by comparing results of students assessments to board performance. Luckily the days of making these evaluations based on strictly qualitative and/or retroactive quantitative data is well behind us. With an assessment tool that harvests assessment performance data, faculty and admins in any institution can empower themselves to make proactive data-driven decisions that are proven to lead to student success for entrance and licensure exams.
The statistical revolution in education has arrived, and it’s time to take advantage of it for the betterment of our students, faculty, curriculum, and institution as a whole. To learn more about how to make informed decisions to improve student retention rates, schedule your ExamSoft demo today.