News Article

College’s AFS strategy draws interest at conference


6/24/2008 2:26:50 PM


Presenters Anna Powell, Dave Touchings and Sheldon Buckle faced many questions from CACUSS delegates interested in College of the North Atlantic’s award winning Access for Success program.

If asking questions is a sign of interest in a subject, then delegates who took in a presentation on College of the North Atlantic’s (CNA) Access for Success (AFS) project were extremely interested in the college’s innovative new program for enhancing student success.

The college’s presentation was one of nearly 80 held on Monday, June 23, as part of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS) conference taking place in St. John’s from June 22-25, and presenters were challenged to fit the presentation into the allotted time-frame due to the number of questions posed by those in attendance.

Presenters Dave Touchings, assessment services coordinator, Anna Powell, program development officer (academic advising), and Sheldon Buckle, functional analyst, explained for the delegates that the college began working on a project to vastly improve student success in 2000.

After years of consultation with faculty, staff and students, the college has built a model it believes is second-to-none anywhere in North America. That thought has been confirmed externally as the college was recently presented with the Noel-Levitz Retention Excellence Award (2005) for the project, and a number of other Canadian and US colleges and universities have asked about acquiring the program for their use.

The Access for Success system works by first getting college applicants to complete a series of inventories. These inventories are intended to provide information to the applicant about the program in which they have enrolled, to ensure they understand what it is about and what careers they may pursue upon earning their diploma. They also help assess whether or not a student may have difficulty with a particular course area within a program. A number of other criteria are also assessed through this process.

“We have had students apply to Medical Laboratory Sciences who were not aware that they would have to handle bodily fluids,” says Touchings. “We hope that by taking these assessment surveys the student will have a much greater understanding about what a program involves, before they actually arrive in the classroom.”

With the surveys completed, the student is assigned an academic advisor. The student meets with this advisor a minimum of two times per semester in their first year. In subsequent years, the advising process is student driven, unless the student has been identified as “at risk” by the advising system, in which case twice-per-semester visits are continued. Advisors use information gathered by the AFS system throughout the student’s time with the college to help determine if interventions are needed and can refer the student to the appropriate resources within the college, such as guidance counsellors, student development officers, and so on, depending on the nature of the problem that needs to be addressed.

According to Buckle, retention rates at sites where AFS has been implemented have increased, although the college is currently putting together trend data from the last five years to get a more clear and accurate picture of just how much of an impact the program has had.

Many delegates stayed behind after the presentation to ask further questions, including how their college or university can avail of the Access for Success system.

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For more information:

Stephen Lee
Manager of Marketing and Communications
College of the North Atlantic
Email: stephen.lee@cna.nl.ca