Academic Affairs Student Success Initiatives & Resources

At MTSU, we strive to provide an ever-improving educational environment for our students, one that removes barriers unrelated to learning, provides support, and raises academic quality and expectations.  The primary effects of this evolving process should be increased student engagement, learning, and ultimately, success.

This web page provides a partial list of some of the many ways in which our academic community is actively working to augment success at MTSU plus links to external resources.  By sharing and highlighting student success efforts on campus, we hope to stimulate discussion and actionable ideas and approaches throughout the community.

A review of the literature on student success reveals several practices that are repeatedly noted for their positive impact *. These approaches can be roughly divided into four categories: advising, community building, pedagogy, and the removal of barriers to success. Below, you can find examples of these approaches plus links to new initiatives being implemented at MTSU.

Exemplar Practices & Ideas

A review of the literature on student success and retention reveals several practices that are repeatedly noted for their positive impact. What follows below are examples of how various colleges and departments at MTSU plan to apply these recognized approaches.

• Advising
• Advising workshops with faculty and staff.
• Academic maps
•  Highly organized advising structure and transition from freshmen advisor to professional advisor to faculty advisor.  
• Faculty participation in early academic alert system.
• Building Community
  • Student mentoring programs (peer, faculty, alumni, community, industry, etc...).
  • Social activities via clubs and honor societies.  
  • Highlight and publicize student and faculty success.
• Pedagogy
  • Experiential learning opportunities.
  • Tutoring services.
  • Course redesign and new academic programs.
  • Additional teaching feedback for faculty.
  • Honors courses.
• Removing Bureaucratic Barriers to Success
  • Address curricular bottle-necks by providing additional academic support services for high fail-rate courses and adjust course schedule to offer more sections of high demand courses.
  • Ease the transition for transfer students.
  • Create early intervention programs for at-risk students.  
  • Remove bureaucracy and student "run-around" (i.e. make it easy to register, understand financial aid, pay bills, be advised, etc. and challenging to learn, not the other way around).

 Suggested Readings