Individual Educational Action Plans for an SSS Grant Competition

Many of our customers are currently writing a TRiO Student Support Services (SSS) grant so there have been many questions posed to us here at Engineerica concerning the AccuSQL Student Success Plan. Individual counseling is a crucial piece to a successful SSS program however, documenting this interaction has always been difficult and time consuming. While many TRiO programs use different titles for their plans, the purpose of an individual education action plan, or success plan as we call them in AccuSQL, is to provide a student with a clear set of objectives which will lead them to success in college. The following statements may be useful for TRiO SSS programs who use, or plan to use AccuSQL 2015:

For the plan of action section of the TRiO grant:

Through the use of AccuSQL student tracking software to document face to face interactions, individual educational action plans (IEAP) will be designed for each participant. The software allows the program to house all of the resources available to participants at both the program and institutional level as action items. When program specialists meet face to face with participants, they will utilize the ability in the software to assign the action items to individual students as a plan for success. The software will document the plan for both the specialist as well as the student. Action items on an individual educational action plan can be set as completed once the student makes use of the suggested resource. Students will receive reminders via email and or text of uncompleted items in their IEAP.

For the evaluation plan section of the TRiO grant:

In order to access the impact program resources have on student success, the individual educational action plans of all participants will be analyzed by cohort. Assessments comparing the use of program resources as well as institutional resources to the rate of persistence to graduation can be conducted. Program resources that have a strong correlation with successful students will be further enhanced while program resources that are not strongly correlated to student success will be reviewed. This method can assist in the determination of which allowable services should continue to be supported by the program and which institutional resources work best for program participants.

In order to assess the impact individual counseling has on student success among the participants, the individual educational action plans can be analyzed with respect to assignment completion rates. When specialists offer individualized counseling, the resulting action taken by the student should support that student’s success. The action item completion rates on the IEAPs stored in the student tracking software can be compared to the students’ persistence to graduation as well as to fall to fall persistence. Low rates of completion for IEAP assignments should correlate with attrition in the program as well as the institution. A low frequency of assignments in a plan should also correlate with student attrition as the student is not receiving enough personal contact from program staff or others on campus. Both assessments will give the program insight to remedies for the provision of effective individual counseling.