It is my favorite Summer past time, because Student Services never sleeps. For most faculty, summer time means an opportunity for a two month break. Not so in Student Services. At St. Clair College, we have two Retention Coordinators and that means, for the most part, one of us has to been available over the spring and summer months. And, I don’t mind working in the summer, the college has air conditioning and the slightly quieter paces means small summer research.
I generally pick a question of interest to me and see where it leads. Some past questions I have explored include:
- What prevents students who have a GPA of 3.0 or better in their final semester from graduating?
- For program X, what is the institutional retention of students who drop out? The difference between stop out and drop out over five years.
- What are the success rates in MTH XXX after offering specialized class walk-in tutoring compared to previous three years?
- What programs do students who have taken preparatory courses graduate from within five years?
- Which programs have high tutoring usage, according to KPI results, but have the lowest KPI satisfaction/highest KPI dissatisfaction (in tutoring)?
Because of this activity, the books I read generally have a research focus. This summer, I am scanning two books I have read in other summers: How to measure anything, 3rd Edition by Donald Hubbard and Workplace research by Zina O’Leary and Jennifer Hunt and I am adding Essential Scrums by Kenneth Rubin.
