SOURCE
Vol. 16
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No. 2
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March 2019
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Fostering Student Success Through Peer Supervision Models
Lauren Rose Bosselait
The use of peers to support student learning in higher education has been growing in popularity for more than a decade (Shook & Keup, 2012). More recently, the idea of leveraging student employment as a high-impact practice (HIP) has been on the rise. In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kuh (2010) argues that “contrary to long-held beliefs, findings from the 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement show that working is positively related to several dimensions of student engagement.” At the same time, many first-year support programs are under pressure to serve more students and make a larger impact on retention. Thus, departments that serve undergraduate students face the need to scale up service, albeit often with fewer or no additional resources.
Christie Maier
Associate Director, Learning Commons
University of Cincinnati Assistant Director, The Study
University of Kentucky
The University of Cincinnati (UC) and the University of Kentucky (UK) each faced this challenge and were forced to adapt. By leveraging peer leadership and student employment, two emerging high-impact practices, UC and UK each built a cost-effective and sustainable peer-to-peer supervision model that has positively impacted first-year retention. We implemented key strategies in developing a model that allowed our respective departments to scale up with fewer resources.
1. Support on a Large Scale Both UC and UK use peer education models in which undergraduate students supervise their peers. Peer leader coordinators (PLCs) provide peer-to-peer supervision for the peer leaders (PLs) who lead learning communities—zero-credit hour first-year seminars attached to 2-5 co-enrolled courses (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Organizational chart for peer education model at the University of Cincinnati. Return to Front Page Copyright © 2019 National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience® and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina
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