2025 National Conference Posters

PULSE: Helping Departments to Transform Undergraduate Education 

Michael Wolyniak, McGavacks Professor of Biology, Hampden-Sydney College
Lisa Elfring, Vice Provost for Assessment, Teaching, and Technology, University of Arizona 

The Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE) is a national network of university faculty and administrators that provides academic departments with resources, skills, and processes that enable them to align their undergraduate programs with national education initiatives, including the Boyer 2030 Commission Report. PULSE helps to develop inclusive, student-centered, evidence-based teaching and learning practices, while removing barriers to access, equity, and inclusion. The PULSE Recognition Program provides a platform forvalue-based departmental review and assessment by providing tools for
self-assessment, collaborative strategies that foster cycles of improvement, and site visits that provide feedback on departments' alignment with national education initiatives. The PULSE Ambassadors Program can help departments align with current national education initiatives by deploying teams of trained facilitators to guide a department in crafting a shared vision and action plan their department. 

UNL Course Demographic Suite: Integrated Dashboards Supporting Institutional Instructor Reflection

Chad Brassil, Faculty Director of Undergraduate Analytics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has created a set of dashboards, called the UNL Course Demographic Suite, which facilitate reflection and analysis on demographic differences in student success at the level of courses. These are an integrated set of dashboards that allows both broad viewing of patterns across campus as will personalized dashboards for instructors to explore demographic differences in individual assignments and click rates on classroom resources. All instructors have access to their personalized dashboards which are embedded directly into Canvas. By utilizing a wide number of metrics, we aim to engage a wide base support and interest among faculty. A culture of support and data is fostered by instructor learning communities, campus-wide workshops, incorporation of these dashboards into Academic Program Reviews, and college-driven departmental reflections. An open-source report is available to support institutions interested in undertaking some of this work.

Improving Persistence: FSU’s Course Repeat Program

Allison Peters, Assistant Dean for Retention and Academic Engagement, Florida State University
Samantha Nix, Program Director, Curricular and Student Success Analytics, Florida State University

Student Success is engrained in the fabric of Florida State University's identity, and the Division of Undergraduate Studies works to identify students in need of specialized support to improve persistence toward graduation. Faculty and staff in the Division and Institutional Research found that courses repeated during the first two years of study slow students’ paths to graduation. Data analysis revealed hundreds of students attempting required courses for the third time or more.

Students who repeat courses are often forced to change their major after failing to complete milestone courses successfully, and struggle to get back on track for their chosen program. Thus, a committee formed to analyze this issue and designed the Course Repeat Support Program. This poster will highlight the program’s development, structure, and outcomes. The program offers personalized academic, personal, and financial support to Undergraduate Studies students attempting a course for the third time or more.

Engaging with External Partners for VIP at Howard

Charles Kim, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Howard University

The VIP (Vertically Integrated Project) at Howard started in 2015 as a founding member of the VIP Consortium. Presently, the VIP at Howard has two tracks in terms of project initiation: One track is faculty initiated projects and the other is industry sponsored projects. This poster focuses on the second track. The main drive for industry sponsored VIP projects is to provide the same VIP benefits to the students with additional benefit of VIP scholarship. The industry - sponsored VIP projects are beneficial to all participating bodies: students, faculty advisors, and sponsoring companies. The students are very positive about industry-sponsored projects and many participants are taking further advantage of enjoying summer internships and furthermore, full-time employment. Faculty advisors have opportunity with sponsoring companies for possible research grants or contracts. Sponsoring companies are also satisfied by the skill-set developed and teamwork trained students as summer intern candidates or future employees.

Centering Students’ Identities to Get to the Heart of Student Success

Danielle Glazer, Manager of Assessment
Michelle Appel, Assistant Vice President
Abigail Do, Associate Data Scientist

Office of Institutional Research, Planning, and Assessment, University of Maryland, College Park

This poster session will share how the University of Maryland, College Park has re-envisioned how we describe students’ identity demographics and how these efforts impact our understanding of student success. Historically, we analyzed retention and graduation rates using binary gender categories and the racial/ethnic categories that are mandated in federal reporting. However, these mandated categories limit each student to one racial/ethnic group and create mutually exclusive categories. As a result, much of the data we analyze risks masking students’ identities and categorizing students in ways in which they may not identify. We will highlight our efforts to create interactive reports for university employees that look beyond these traditional categories. We will share how, by looking at student demographics through a broader lens, we discovered new insights into the makeup of our student body and have been able to assess student success in more nuanced ways.

Enhancing Intellectual Leadership through Boise State’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program

Jim Fredricksen, Director of the Institute
Lavanya Seetamraju, Undergraduate Research Program Manager

Institute for Inclusive and Transformative Scholarship (IFITS), Boise State University

The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program at Boise State University fosters authentic interdisciplinary collaboration among
faculty and students. By applying the “Charting Pathways for Intellectual Leadership” framework (Fritzsche, Hart-Davidson, and Long, 2022), our poster demonstrates how the VIP program embeds pathways to intellectual leadership within its curriculum, thus facilitating meaningful scholarly engagement and mentorship. This framework describes intellectual leadership with three categories of impact, namely “sharing knowledge,” “expanding opportunities,” and “mentoring/stewarding.” In addition, our poster will also illustrate how we survey VIP participants - students about how often they practice behaviors associated with NACE competencies and faculty about how often they provide students those opportunities. In brief, this poster will show how Boise State’s VIP program is an example of a comprehensive, supportive model for developing the intellectual leadership capacities of faculty and students.

Promoting Experiential Education Through Clarity of Definitions

Kathryn Stremiecki, Director, Office of Experiential Education, PurdueUniversity
Jennifer Dobbs-Oates, Associate Vice Provost for World Readiness; Clinical Professor, Department of Human Development and Family Science, Purdue University

Working in experiential education can sometimes feel like a game of semantics. Academic units and co-curricular departments have a variety of terms and definitions they use to describe experiential education that may be unique to their disciplines and their accrediting organizations. These terms also tend to be different than what are used in the workplace and in the community. Through a qualitative analysis exercise, Purdue University identified and defined seven types of experiential education practiced at the university. This framework provides a shared language that is now used broadly across the university and helps educators to locate their practices within the experiential education ecosystem.

National Alumni Career Mobility Survey: Using Insight to Inform Career Development Strategic Direction

Louise Jackson, Director, University Career Center, University of Michigan
Joslyn Johnson, Assistant Dean of Student Development & Career Initiatives, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, University of Michigan

In recent years, there has been a shift in the role career development plays in undergraduate student success, with a stronger focus on longer-term career outcomes as a supplement to first destinations (the more common measure). The main critique of the assertion is that first destination assessments do not account for stronger career outcomes  that occur decades post-graduation. This panel (and poster) focuses on assessing career mobility from alumni 5-10 years post-completion of their undergraduate degree and what alumni value about said degree concerning career preparation and satisfaction. In addition to supporting student/alumni development and career services programming on campus, the goal of this research is to continue to develop a more robust and comprehensive data collection effort regarding alumni career mobility to inform the campus’ strategic direction in this space. Doing so will help institutions respond to the current climate around career outcomes, as in undergraduate degree value, to talent retention in Michigan initiatives, and to ensuring consideration of more than just salary as a measure of 'success'.

The Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Consortium: Systemic Reform of Higher Education

Edward Coyle, John B. Peatman, Distinguished Professor and GRA Eminent Scholar; Director of VIP@GT and the VIP Consortium, Georgia Institute of Technology
Mark Randolph, Executive Director, VIP Consortium

The VIP Consortium is a worldwide, nonprofit alliance of more than 50 colleges and universities that operate Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programs. Each VIP team is requested by and embedded in the creative activities of the faculty/academic-staff/research-staff on campus. Each team is long-term and large-scale with a multidisciplinary focus. The Consortium holds an Annual Meeting that serves as a hub for research, evaluation, and recruitment of VIP programs. It invites program directions, coordinators, and key stakeholders from emerging programs to veteran sites. The consortium holds an Annual Meeting serving as a hub for research, evaluation, and recruitment, with the meeting itself being highly participatory and focused on peer-to-peer exchange. Visit this poster presentation to hear about developing software for peer evaluation and grading, with an option to share anonymized data for research on VIP's impact, as well as the VIP Consortium’s goal of worldwide systemic reform of higher education.

Scalability and Equity in Undergraduate Research: Serving 30% of Undergrads (and Still Growing!) Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program

Julia Sonnenberg-Klein, Executive Director, Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program, Georgia Institute of Technology
Edward Coyle, John B. Peatman Distinguished Professor and GRA Eminent Scholar; Director of VIP@GT and the VIP Consortium, Georgia Institute of Technology

Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Programs support faculty research  and student development by embedding large multidisciplinary student teams in faculty projects (research, design, deployment, creative endeavors, etc.). The Georgia Institute of Technology is the lead institution in the VIP Consortium, with the largest program in the Consortium and substantial research on program impact. This poster will highlight research findings on scalability, equity and impact of VIP model for undergraduate research.

College Access and Affordability/Student Experience and Belonging

Neonne Ameer, Director of College Counseling, Student Leadership
Angelique Figueroa, Student Leadership Network

College readiness is embedded in the New York City Department of Education's high school system, or at least it should be. Students take regents, honors, and advanced placement courses and exams but must prepare for the City University of New York (CUNY) college entrance exams. Students' college entrance exams assess their readiness to take college-level courses. Low scores in entrance exams mean students are set to take remedial courses in math and English, which are not credit- bearing. While also analyzing the impact and benefits of students placed in one of the summer opportunity programs: College Discovery (CD), Search of Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK), Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, and Accelerate, Complete, Engage (ASAP/ACE) to prepare them to take/retake the entrance exam to ensure students are better prepared for their first semester of college courses, especially as a first-generation college student.