Moving Beyond Silos to Support Student Success in Gateway Courses

This session will engage participants around the ongoing efforts of 8 campuses working collaboratively to improve persistence and address disparities for students who are low-income, first-generation, or underrepresented minorities by eliminating equity gaps in grade patterns in gateway courses as part of the Association of Public & Land Grant Universities' (APLU) Powered by Publics Big Ten Cluster. This Cluster's improvement aim builds upon the group's previous examination of student course data and the practices/ policies affecting success rates in entry-level courses.

The Cluster has played an important role for participating institutions in serving to keep student success in gateway courses centered as a priority by sharing ideas, finding commonalities, and challenging each other to keep making progress. Recently, the Cluster developed a Logic Model to map and support each institution's efforts in building a climate that informs, engages, and empowers stakeholders to collectively share and use data to end cycles of inequity in gateway courses. This session will share the Logic Model "roadmap," how it is being utilized, and provide an opportunity for participants to assess their own campus' progress.

Work at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities will serve as a case study for this session. Our campus has seen an evolution from a small group of individuals discussing gateway courses, to a larger committee, and now campus-wide conversations with increased access to student course outcome and degree progress data. Contextualizing our work in the Logic Model has served to ground the work and provide clearer direction for next steps.