ERIC Number: ED537263
Record Type: Non-Journal
Publication Date: 2012-Jan
Pages: 8
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
On the Road to Success: How States Collaborate and Use Data to Improve Student Outcomes. Executive Summary
Jobs for the Future
Enrollment is rising across the nation's community colleges, but completion rates remain untenably low. Reformers are focusing on the importance of using comprehensive, high-quality data on student progress and completion to bring about change. A core tenet of Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges Count has been to embed a culture of data-informed decision making on campuses and in state capitals. To move this work forward, a group of data experts from Achieving the Dream's state policy teams came together in 2005 to design and test a valuable set of intermediate measures that demonstrate how community college students progress--or, as is too often the case, fail to progress--toward a credential or further education. Most important, this Cross-State Data Work Group showed the predictive power of interim indicators for identifying students in great need of intervention early enough to help boost their chances of staying in and finishing college. "On the Road to Success" presents the next step taken by the Cross-State Data Work Group: a comparative analysis of a comprehensive set of intermediate milestones and final measures of success that practitioners and policymakers can use to rethink and remake their approaches to increasing student achievement. Any institution in the country can use these "Benchmarks of Student Success"--a set of key indicators of community college student progression and completion--to frame strategic planning. This is one of the first times such comparative data are being reported publicly. The state-level data in this brief represent only part of what the members of the Data Work Group have collected and reported, and their cross-state conversations will continue. Perhaps an even more powerful impact will be derived as states turn this analytic approach inward and examine the comparative effectiveness of colleges within a single state. (Contains 4 figures.) [For the full report, "On the Road to Success: How States Collaborate and Use Data to Improve Student Outcomes," see ED537262.]
Descriptors: Community Colleges, Comparative Analysis, Strategic Planning, Educational Improvement, Student Improvement, Partnerships in Education, Management Information Systems, Academic Persistence, Progress Monitoring, Information Utilization, Achievement Rating, Outcome Measures, Educational Assessment, Educational Indicators
Jobs for the Future. 88 Broad Street 8th Floor, Boston, MA 02110. Tel: 617-728-4446; Fax: 617-728-4857; e-mail: info@jff.org; Web site: http://www.jff.org
Publication Type: Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: Postsecondary Education; Two Year Colleges
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: Jobs for the Future
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A