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Celebrate Learning!
Achieving the Dream
Focus Groups Identify Barriers to Student Success
By Margaret E. Lee, Th.D.
Student success tops the list of TCC’s strategic priorities for
the new academic year, and rightly so. TCC’s mission is to better
our community by helping students to achieve their dreams. TCC
retains about 74% of our first-time freshmen in their first semester (2004-2008 cohort). Fall-to-fall retention of this same group
stands at 48% (2004-2007 cohort), and their degree (or certificate) completion rate is about 13% (2004-2006 cohort)
(Achieving the Dream Quick Facts, http://
www.tulsacc.edu/70338/). While we celebrate this success,
TCC aspires to help even more students reach their goals. But
how?
To enable more students to succeed, we need to understand
what stands in their way. Since Spring 2008, TCC’s Data Team
has been asking WHY students do not succeed, and what barriers they experience on their paths to success. To answer these
questions, the Data Team has conducted focus groups among
students, faculty and staff. Like all forms of data, focus groups
can tell only part of the story. The bigger picture takes shape
only when focus group data augments summative data about
TCC’s students and students at other community colleges, national
research on student success, and other sources. Focus groups
cannot offer proof or statistically generalizable conclusions –
that is not their purpose. Focus groups help us to explore the
underlying reasons why students fail to achieve their dreams.
Knowing why helps us to know how to intervene and what should
change to make students more successful.
Our Data Team consists of faculty members from all four
campuses, representing a variety of disciplines. The Team also
includes a representative from the Office of Planning and Institutional Research. All Data Team members have been trained by
our Achieving the Dream mentors in a particular method of focus
group facilitation and data analysis designed for our purpose.
This method moves beyond the exploration of general questions
to reveal particular information about specific barriers to student
success. In each focus group, participants are first asked to identify barriers and then are asked to explore the scope and importance of each barrier, the knowledge and actions necessary
to overcome each barrier, suggestions for change, and successful
practices and resources for overcoming each barrier.
The Data Team’s focus group projects uncover important
information about the kinds of challenges our students experience. In Spring 2008, the Data Team asked students, faculty
and staff about the challenges of staying in school. The most
frequently-mentioned challenges pertained to difficulties of adjusting to college and balancing school with the rest of their life.
For example, students explained that they found it difficult to
make the transition from high school to college and to manage
the freedom and independence that comes with being a college
student. Some students reported that they felt overwhelmed at
first. Other students talked about the difficulties of balancing
their college responsibilities with those of being a parent or
working a full-time job. Inside the classroom, many students experienced difficulty understanding course requirements and communicating with their instructors.
(Continued on page 3)
Challenges to Persistence – St Y[