{"id":9191,"date":"2025-10-13T08:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-10-13T13:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/?p=9191"},"modified":"2025-10-30T07:53:49","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T12:53:49","slug":"seeking-data-insights-to-improve-student-interventions-at-east-texas-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.everylearnereverywhere.org\/es\/blog\/seeking-data-insights-to-improve-student-interventions-at-east-texas-am\/","title":{"rendered":"Seeking Data Insights to Improve Student Interventions at East Texas A&M"},"content":{"rendered":"

The sooner a struggling college student receives help, the faster they\u2019re able to get back on track. At East Texas A&M University, where Sierra Jones is director of the Student Transition Department, those students will soon be able to get help even earlier.<\/p>\n

Until recently, says Jones, the university began outreach to struggling students around midterms, because that’s when faculty report data about student performance. But that was often too late to allow students to improve their grades. \u201cWe found that interventions at that point tend to not give enough time,\u201d Jones says.<\/p>\n

Moving that timeline up, however, would require a different source of data, so when Jones and her colleagues learned of Building an Academic Data Culture to Support Student Success<\/a>, a professional development program delivered by the Association of Public & Land-grant Universities (APLU) through Every Learner Everywhere\u00ae, they hoped it would give them the tools to better proactively identify students who might need higher levels of support. Specifically, they wanted to learn what pre-enrollment data could be used to identify students who might benefit from interventions earlier than mid-term grades.<\/p>\n

Building an Academic Data Culture is one of a menu of training, consultation, and technical assistance services by APLU and other partners in the Every Learner Everywhere\u00ae network<\/a>. The services support the effective implementation of high-quality digital learning at scale in areas like course design, institutional planning, and evaluation.<\/p>\n

The East Texas A&M University team participating in \u201cBuilding an Academic Data Culture\u201d in spring 2025 was made up of colleagues with different perspectives about the kind of data the institution can use to support student success, including personnel from enrollment management, admissions, faculty, and academic advising. The goal of bringing this group together was to uncover commonalities between past students who had ended up on academic probation and the incoming student cohort so the university could intervene earlier than midterm.<\/p>\n

What they found has exciting implications, not just for early interventions, but for the university\u2019s overall data culture.<\/p>\n

Understanding the value of pre-enrollment testing<\/h2>\n

As the team explored the possibility of using pre-enrollment data as an early indicator, they started by re-examining existing signals. One indicator the university had already been using to guide their student support activities was the Texas Success Initiative (TSI) assessment, which is used to determine a student’s readiness for college-level English and math courses.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistorically, we’ve looked at TSI exemption as being a threshold for the type of support students receive by default,\u201d Jones says. Students who are not TSI exempt are required to take two first-year seminar courses in developmental English or math, along with a separate first-year seminar from TSI-exempt students.<\/p>\n