ACE Pathway, Faculty Institute, and Assessment Tools

Change, THE MAGAZINE OF HIGHER LEARNING published an article called “Supporting the Students of the Future” by Diego Navarro, the Director of the Academy for College Excellence–in the January/February 2012 issue. In his article, Diego describes the model developed by the Academy for College Excellence to identify and understand vulnerable students and to provide interventions that meet the needs of these under-prepared students from diverse backgrounds. Diego will be conducting a new series of free webinars further exploring the ideas he outlined in the article; to learn about the webinar, go to www.my-ace.org/change-webinar.

ACE has gained extensive experience and developed strategies that can help community colleges identify the ways that they currently work with vulnerable students, assess their existing approaches, and support changes to increase effectiveness with these students. Three concrete ways that ACE can help your college to better address the needs of vulnerable students:

• ACE Pathway: Apply the concepts outlined in Diego Navarro’s Change Magazine article “Supporting the Students of the Future” in practical steps.  ACE Pathway offers colleges a flexible process of both inquiry and action, using evidence-based solutions shown to increase retention and completion for vulnerable students.  As noted in the article:

Not all students with similar risk factors are equally vulnerable. Risk factors are about students’ external environment and experiences, whereas vulnerability is the internal legacy of those things and makes up the sense of self.

ACE Pathway helps colleges to

1. Gauge the size of their vulnerable student population;
2. Understand these students’ needs;
3. Individually measure student vulnerability to accurately match the type of intervention and level of support to each student’s level of need; and
4. Determine appropriate solutions

This matching can reduce costs and increase effectiveness.
Click here to learn more about ACE Pathway.

• Faculty Institute: To prepare colleges to support the transformation that vulnerable students need to make, ACE has developed the ACE Faculty Experiential Learning Institute (FELI). The FELI is a five-day transformative learning experience designed for community college faculty and administrators. This experiential workshop is the first step for faculty interested in using ACE pedagogy. The workshop simulates the transformative learning incorporated into the ACE Bridge Semester program for students, to enable faculty to maximize their support of all students with whom they interact, with particular tools for helping vulnerable student populations.
  Click here to learn more about the FELI.

• Assessment Tools: ACE has developed an assessment instrument—the College Student Self-Assessment Survey (CSSAS) that measures the vulnerability of students. The CSSAS is an on-line survey that integrates into existing assessment processes so colleges can obtain more complete information on the varying levels of need of their incoming student population.
  Click here to learn more about CSSAS.
  "Development of CSSAS and Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of CSSAS" - excerpt from MPR Evaluation of the Academy for College Excellence - December 2011 (pdf)