Read the brief to learn why course completion rates are an important indicator of student success and how to improve outcomes while maintaining academic rigor during course redesign.
Improve gateway course completion ratesWhile high DFW rates (30%-40%) are typical for many gateway courses, some faculty remain skeptical of attempts to improve course completion rates. Recognizing and addressing faculty concerns is essential to making progress. Pedagogical conversations that focus on blaming weak students (or weak instructors) for poor outcomes are rarely productive.
Research has shown that redesigning the pedagogical model for gateway courses can measurably improve student success, but complete course redesigns can be expensive, time-consuming, and politically challenging. Simply adding supplemental instruction or early-low stakes assessments, for example, can also have a major positive impact but with significantly less effort. Many approaches to pedagogical innovation require the engagement of instructors, but they do not depend on having large numbers of faculty fundamentally rethinking their teaching philosophy.
This resource is part of the Facilitate Student-Centered Course Redesign Roadmap. Access the Roadmap for stepwise guidance with additional tools and research.
Four steps to address course completion rates 1. Size the opportunityWhile every institution recognizes that some students do not complete some courses, many are surprised when they actually analyze the data. Quantifying DFW rates at the institutional, college, department, and course level can help administrators and faculty understand just how many credits are being lost and how many students are being negatively impacted.
It is important to look at both the DFW rate (the percentage of…