Student Success Coaching in Tennessee: Results from a 3-Year Randomized Control Trial

• In Event: The Persistence Puzzle: Understanding Departures and Designing Effective Support for Community College Students

Abstract

Purpose 
More than half of Tennessee community college students enter college underprepared for coursework. Although these students’ course success rates increased when the Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) adopted a corequisite model of learning support (i.e., remedial or developmental education) in 2015 for all students at all colleges, the change did not improve student persistence (Ran & Yin, 2022), and the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated these challenges (TBR, 2024). This study addresses these challenges by implementing a holistic advising model at two community colleges in students’ first year, with five coaches providing career and course success coaching that goes beyond typical course registration performed by college advisors. We leverage a randomized control trial (RCT) to address this question: To what extent does access to a coach improve learning support students’ course success and persistence outcomes? After two full years of implementation, results indicate positive impacts on student outcomes. This study is one of the first to show improvements in persistence for corequisite learning support students.  

Research Methods  
Our research leverages student-level administrative data and an RCT to estimate the impact of coaching on students’ outcomes. Because we randomly assigned corequisite learning support students to coaching or standard advising, the differences between their average outcomes represent the causal impact of coaching. To randomly assign students to coaching (the treatment group) or standard advising (the control group), we used student lists provided to us at the beginning of each fall semester by our two partner colleges. Then, we randomly assigned students at each college separately. Students assigned to treatment and control groups come from two cohorts: those who first enrolled in fall 2022 and fall 2023. We randomly assigned a third cohort of students in fall 2024. 

Results 
Results from the first two years of coaching indicate that access to coaches improved students’ success in gateway courses and their persistence rates. Across colleges and cohorts of students, treated students were six percentage points more likely to pass their gateway math course than students in the control group. Treated students were two percentage points more likely to pass their gateway writing course than students in the control group. Students in the treatment group were three percentage points more likely to earn college credit in their first semester. Finally, students in the treatment group were four percentage points more likely to persist from their first fall semester to their first spring semester than students in the control group. 

Implications & Future Research 
This work identifies a path forward for improving outcomes for one of the student populations most at-risk for stopping or dropping out of college. In the coming years, we will continue to follow students who were randomly assigned to a coach to better understand their college completion, transfer, and labor market outcomes.  

Author

• Cara Ann DeLoach, Tennessee Board of Regents
  Presenting Author