Don't Force It: The Critical Importance of Student Choice in Accessing Academic Support

In a landscape where student retention has evolved from a simple metric to an outcome in and of itself, higher education professionals and administrators often rush to discern "what works" and to plug students into those pathways to persistence. While I expect (hope!) I am not alone in rejecting retention as an outcome, I do believe that this logic is easy to follow. However, what I want to explore here are the ways that we guide students to these pathways. 

 

A major trend I've observed over the last decade or so is an increase in requiring our students to do different things. Advising is critical, so we require advising appointments before registration. Living on campus is highly correlated with persistence, so our residential campuses implement one or two year residence requirements. Supplemental instruction assessment results show connections to course completion and success, so we make SI required. First generation students seem to benefit from mentoring, so we assign them a mentor and mandate regular meetings or conversations.

 

While some of these examples may have a solid foundation in the literature and are reasonable (e.g., living on campus or meeting with an academic advisor), I suggest that we have extended this model too far. Further, new research shows that mandating experiences like tutoring could actually impede the very success we hope to foster.

 

I recently completed a research project that examines the cultures that develop in peer tutoring spaces. While this is not intended to be a formal write up of that research, I do believe it speaks to these issues. Through multiple focus groups on two different campuses, students repeatedly shared stories about their choice to access peer tutoring. These narratives were deeply personal to them, and full of meaning. Reflecting back on this choice, students understood it as a pivotal moment for them. Yes, the tutoring helped, but the choice to access a resource was critical, enduring, and a catalyst for development.

 

When I began the research, I did not expect students to have such strong feelings about their choice to access peer tutoring. It became clear through my conversations with groups of students that choosing to access tutoring for the first time meant that they were consistently more willing to access other resources on campus. Examples here include professors' office hours, counseling services, disability support, mentoring, etc. This willingness persisted whether or not students reported having a good experience with peer tutoring.

 

The overall lesson I learned from this part of the research is that, while students certainly benefit in myriad ways from accessing peer tutoring, they benefit dramatically from being allowed to make that choice.

 

Student agency is critical. We can encourage, cajole, suggest, or refer students to academic support services like tutoring, but access should not be required. The decision making process students undergo when choosing whether or not to utilize academic support programs is critical to helping them become self-regulated learners. That skill and the willingness to be vulnerable by accessing supports are, I believe, substantive ways that students persist on our campuses.