Included In The 2022 Horizon Report
An Institutional Approach to Student Success Reporting, Resource Accountability, and Data Integrity Verification
Overview
Cal Poly Pomona developed an inter-divisional data integrity verification process that is replicable, transferrable, scalable, and supported by senior leadership. The process was formed to increase visibility for specific student groups within the university’s student success dashboards created by Institutional Research and Enrollment Management. The data governance committee leads the tasks of identifying, verifying, and validating student group data in preparation for integration into the dashboard and greater resource accountability. This project not only served as a business process exemplar for data integrity, it also allowed many student support resources to feel seen and included in the campus conversation and it enabled conversations to move beyond clean data to actionable insights based on the data.
Exemplar Practices
In order to build an evidence-based decision-making culture, data and data analysis are required to produce actionable insights. Every successful data project begins with clean and reliable data. At Cal Poly Pomona, we developed an inter-divisional data integrity verification process that is replicable, transferrable, scalable, and supported by our senior leadership. The process was formed through our campus data governance committee, which was established in an effort to bolster a data-informed culture in leadership and in practice. The committee co-chairs were leaders from Information Technology and Enrollment Management and the committee included leadership from Institutional Research, the data warehouse, designees from Academic Affairs, Student Affairs, Administrative Affairs, Advancement, Foundation, and faculty and student representation.
Prior to the pandemic and the formation of the data governance committee, Institutional Research created a Student Success dashboard of data that visualizes four-year and six-year graduation rates for undergraduate students by their entering cohort. These data are accessed by a number of campus resources to determine the level to which students are achieving the success goals set for our campus and which student groups require added support. Data in the dashboard can be filtered and disaggregated to display graduation rates by a number of factors including gender, Pell-eligibility, ethnicity, college major, and more.
As a result of the pandemic and remote learning, the charge of the committee shifted from managing data requests and removing data silos across campus, to focusing on how to institutionally support student success through the use of data. Collectively, the committee decided to prioritize student success data and determine how each division could contribute to and make use of that data. In our initial post-pandemic meetings, each division’s representative presented their division’s student success data priorities and identified the student groups that they wanted to add to the Student Success dashboard for reporting and better visibility. Filtering for specific student groups on the dashboard would provide greater visibility for the groups and allow the campus leadership and the teams that serve the student groups to access and compare the groups' progress towards completion. Through consensus, the committee prioritized and selected the initial student groups that should be integrated into the Student Success dashboard. A few of the student groups selected include Early Start, Veterans, Athletics, Honors College, and students in the CSU Educational Opportunity Program (EOP).
A working group was created for each student group that we identified. The working group consisted of a student information system (SIS) expert from Enrollment management, a data analyst from Institutional Research, a data warehouse representative, the division’s representative on the committee, the subject matter expert or the resource staff who works with that student group, and the data governance committee chair. The goal of the working group was to either create a student group in the campus SIS or clean and verify an existing student group in the SIS for use in reporting and access through the data warehouse. This part of the process was iterative and required an explanation of – and sometimes change to – the resource’s business process for storing and maintaining the student data. In some instances, we automated manual processes, consolidated data or groups that were supported by more than one campus resource (such as students participating in an Early Start pre-summer program), and decommissioned student groups in the SIS that were no longer used. During this phase, we also documented each student group’s data owner, the data maintenance schedules, and the person(s) responsible for regular maintenance.
Once the integrity of a student group’s data was verified, it was ready for integration into the Student Success dashboard. Institutional Research worked with the data warehouse team to include each group as a drop-down filter on the Tableau dashboard. These group-specific filters are now available to the campus community and provide actionable insights and accountability. The process now serves as an example and model for how our campus can work collaboratively as an institution to support student success and promote student resource accountability and data integrity.
Alignment with Cal Poly Pomona Strategic Goals
The project directly aligns with our strategic plan goal of improving our campus infrastructure and organizational capacity. By redesigning administrative processes for collecting, storing, and maintaining data, we are planning for business systems to be more efficient, effective, sustainable, and scalable. The project also serves as an exemplar for the importance of clean, reliable data to use in reporting. Through this project, we are able to provide visibility for other strategic plan initiatives, such as delivering quality programs and student support accountability that promote integrative learning, discovery, and creativity, as well as enhance student learning, development, and success. Finally, this business process not only serves as an exemplar for data integrity, it also facilitated an institutional approach to student support through a process of transparency and shared responsibility. This approach enabled all support resources involved to feel seen and included in the campus conversation and set precedent for the implementation of collaborative actionable insights based on the data.