The Effectiveness of Student Coaching in Community Colleges

ABSTRACT

Many community colleges consider non-academic supports as a way to improve student retention and achievement. Past studies on the effects of coaching, mentoring, advising, and other non-academic supports yielded evidence for the effectiveness of these interventions to promote student outcomes. In addition, some suggested that the effects were stronger for more intense programs, as measured by meeting frequency. However, less was known about the effectiveness of these programs at community colleges or in cases where the intervention only lasts one semester. Our evaluation added to the body of rigorous research on the effects of academic coaching by applying a quasi-experimental design to analyze the outcomes of a short-term coaching intervention – the InsideTrack Coaching program – at two Montana community colleges. Using propensity score matching, the results showed positive impacts of short-term coaching, particularly for more intense coaching (two or more meetings in a semester), on student retention and achievement measures. These findings had implications for the types of short-term, high impact student support programming that community colleges might implement.

Notes

1. For more details on InsideTrack’s methodology and coaching, see: https://www.insidetrack.com/coaching/.

2. The U.S. Department of Labor funded the SWAMMEI program through a Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training grant. These grants are designed to assist workers whose jobs have been negatively impacted by foreign trade by training them for in-demand occupations in their state. For more information, see Mikelson, Eyster, Durham, and Cohen (2017).

3. About 13% of students did not receive any credits during their enrollment and have a zero cumulative grade point average (GPA). Most of these students enrolled in developmental education courses, which are not for credit, and dropped out prior to earning credit in other courses. In addition, this group includes students who attempted courses for credit and failed because we could not differentiate between these students and those who just took developmental education courses, possibly left-censoring average academic outcomes. We do not expect this to influence estimation of the effects of InsideTrack because supplemental analyses examining the relationship between no credits or GPA earned and InsideTrack treatment groups reveal no differences in the likelihood of earning no credits and having a zero GPA after accounting for demographic differences. Results are available upon request.

4. We use data from Missoula College students who began enrollment between 2009 and 2014 to calculate the proportion of students who complete developmental math in their first year of enrollment. These students were used because at least four years of course-taking data is available for all students, compared to the minimum of one year of data available for coached sample students. Data from earlier cohorts of Great Falls College students were unavailable.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Montana State University;