Finding Your Pathway Course: Providing an Organized Process for Forming Goals

Dr. Greg M. Ahrenhoerster, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Sue Kalinka, Director of Student Development University of Wisconsin Milwaukee College of General Studies

Bailey (2017) observed: “Most colleges do not provide an organized process to help students form long-term goals and design an academic program to achieve those goals. Rather, students must recognize when they need help and seek it out on their own” (p. 36).

This is an accurate description of our institution, the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (UWM) College of General Studies, which is an open-access, two-year liberal arts institution of around 2000 students (more than 50% first-generation and 25-30% Pelleligible). Most students enter college undecided about their major. Resources were available to help students develop academic and career goals in the form of academic advisors and a career counselor, but students had to seek them out, and many did not.

We concluded that we could address this problem by designing a class in which students researched various academic and career goals and developed a plan for achieving those goals, which we did in Fall 2017. After teaching this course for multiple semesters and gathering extensive data on the 2018-2019 cohort, we are convinced this class achieves the goal of effectively providing students with an organized process for forming academic and career goals and is positively correlated with student retention and academic success.

Course Design

We designed the course, Finding Your Pathway (LEC 105) together, drawing on our experiences as a writing professor and Director of Student Development, in consultation with the Academic Advising team and career counselor. We incorporated sessions with advising and career staff into the course so students are required to interact with them. The result was a course designed to help students meet the following learning objectives:

1. develop the skills to create an academic, career, and financial pathway, and learn the process for future revisions to that pathway;

2. create a vision for one’s future, based on internal and external characteristics;

3. identify personal core values and desired work values, along with personal strengths, abilities, talents, gifts, and interests;

4. become an engaged and self-reflective learner who takes responsibility for their goals and learning process;

5. use appropriate campus resources for academic success and personal development;

6. communicate effectively (e.g., fluent use of thesis, argumentation, support, source materials, and organization); and

7. demonstrate critical thinking, information literacy, andtechnological skills.

After team-teaching a pilot section of the class in Spring 2018, we revised the course and offered five sections in Fall 2018. A general call was sent out to find people interested in teaching the course. Instructors from the fields of psychology, philosophy, and english expressed interest. We provided the new instructors with a halfday training session and access to a Canvas site containing course resources. Students were recruited into this three-credit elective course by advisors, both during New Student Orientation and during one-on-one advising sessions.

The class is divided into three units, culminating in a final project. Unit 1 is largely focused on learning objectives 3 and 4 but lays the groundwork for the other objectives. Students read about student success, the psychology of choice, happiness, and the value of the liberal arts. In addition, students work through exercises requiring reflection on their interests, skills, and values. One reflective activity is a paper entitled The Student I Am and the Student I’d Like to Become. The paper discusses how they could use student success strategies more effectively.

Units 2 and 3 more directly focus on learning objectives 1, 2, and 5 (objectives 6 and 7 are worked on throughout the class). Unit 2 requires students to research two potential careers, using multiple career exploration resources (e.g., My Plan, Career One Stop, O*Net Online, and Occupational Outlook Handbook) and to conduct two informational interviews. The career counselor leads two class sessions and encourages students to make individual appointments to receive personalized support. This unit culminates in a paper summarizing their research and reflecting on how well the careers match their skills, values, and interests.

Unit 3 requires students to research at least two distinct academic goals they are considering, including colleges they could transfer to and degrees they might pursue. Academic advisors lead class sessions on finding information about other schools and how to transfer. We also cover financial literacy and paying for college. The students write a paper summarizing their research and mapping out the courses they would take each semester if they pursued a particular goal.

At the end of the semester, students present the career and academic pathway they are currently planning to pursue and offer a significant reflection about how their goals fit what they have learned about themselves in both an oral presentation and a paper. They must reflect on the challenges they might encounter and discuss their plan for addressing those challenges.

Research Findings

As a way to assess learning objectives 1, 2, 3, and 4, information was gathered about the effects that completing the course had on students enrolled in Fall 2018 or Spring 2019, through student surveys and textual analysis of final projects.

Expectations of Faculty

At the beginning and end of the semester, students were invited to complete an anonymous Qualtrics survey about their confidence in their academic and career plans and how much personal responsibility they took for their decisions, which relate to learning objectives 1, 2, and 3. We found that completing the class significantly increased the students’ confidence in their career goal, their academic goal, and their academic pathway (see Table 1). A significance level below 0.05 was considered significant.

It is worth noting that student participation in the survey was lower at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, students in all UWM classes had been asked to participate in many surveys at the end of this particular semester, so survey fatigue had likely set in. Despite the lower response rate, the data analysis still showed statistical significance.

In addition, we asked students how much they saw themselves as personally responsible for their own academic and career goals, which relates to learning objective 4. Again, we saw a significant increase at the end of the semester.

Textual Analysis of Final Projects

Permission was obtained from 54 students to use their final projects as evidence for our study. The textual analysis showed that most students gained significant knowledge about their career and academic goals (learning objectives 1 and 2), though fewer students thoroughly reflected on their values, skills, and interests (learning objectives 3 and 4). Many discussed the relief they felt in finally having a goal:

• “When I first started [college] I had no idea what I was going for, what school I would transfer to, and where I would live. This made it extremely difficult to be motivated to stay in college. Taking LEC 105 has made me motivated to stay in school and I now know what I want to do.”

• “It is refreshing knowing exactly what I want…to do for a career. I am so excited to fulfill my dreams and truly look forward to where this path will lead me.”

In addition, many students who were not able to identify a specific career or academic goal expressed appreciation for the knowledge they gained in the course:

• “If I need to alter my current pathway or attend a different university, there are four other colleges I have researched… that align with my…plans as a student.”

Thus, while not every student had specific career and academic goals at the end of the semester, it is noteworthy that many students still appreciated the skills they learned.

Retention Data

As Table 3 shows, 66.1% of the 112 students who completed Finding Your Pathway that year were still enrolled in our college the following fall, which is significantly higher than our typical fall-to-fall retention rate of 50%. An additional 21 students (18.8%) had successfully transferred to another college or university, meaning 84.8% were still enrolled in higher education one year later, higher than our typical rate of 70%. Three students (2.7%) had completed an associate degree and stopped attending college. Thus, only 12.5% of the students had neither earned a degree nor were actively working toward one.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest that this course successfully created “an organized process to help students form long-term goals and design an academic program to achieve those goals,” which had meaningful effects on our students’ understanding of how to develop such goals and confidence in their ability to achieve them. This, in turn, appears to have increased their retention in higher education one year later. Future plans include tracking these students to determine whether taking the course increases the likelihood of completing a college degree.

We are currently considering the best ways to encourage students to take the Finding Your Pathway course. Currently, it is an optional, elective course, but it could be made a degree requirement. For the 2020-2021 cohort of students enrolled in UW Milwaukee’s First Year Bridge program, we have made this course mandatory in the students’ second semester.

We believe that this is a sustainable and effective intervention that could easily be duplicated at other schools and colleges with many options for customizing the course to reflect each institution’s unique advising and matriculation processes.

References

Bailey, T (2017). Community colleges and student success: Models for comprehensive reform. Educause Review, 52(3), 32-44.

CONTACT

Dr. Greg M. Ahrenhoerster

ahrenhoe@uwm.edu

Sue Kalinka

kalinkas@uwm.edu