Learn how to use the Postsecondary Data Partnership Gateway Course Completion dashboard to understand the relationship between students’ academic performance and the completion of their required gateway courses.
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As a reminder, the Gateway Course Completion dashboard reports the number of first-year students who successfully complete their required math and/or English gateway courses. Students who complete all required gateway courses prior to enrolling at the institution are not represented in this dashboard.
Let’s use this dashboard to answer this question: What is the relationship between first-year student academic performance and completion of their required gateway courses?
The Gateway Course Completion dashboard is one of the early momentum metrics.
In order to understand the relationship between two variables, like GPA and Gateway Course Completion Rate, you need to apply the GPA dimension.
The lines in the line chart represent completion rates for each GPA range.
In addition, a section for each GPA range is shown in the bar chart.
But the horizontal stacked bar chart remains unchanged. This chart provides an overview of the dataset and remains unchanged when dimensions are applied.
Let's focus our attention on the line chart. Because there are nine GPA ranges, there are nine lines, which makes it difficult to read this chart. Let's filter out the middle GPA ranges and only keep GPA ranges 2.0 to 2.5 and 3.5 to 4.0, the higher and lower ranges.
Now the chart is much easier to read. Hovering over the 2018-19 data point for first-year students earning a 3.5 to 4.0 GPA shows 40% were successful in completing their required gateway courses during their first year of college.
However, hovering over the 2018-19 data point for first-year students earning a 2.0 to 2.5 GPA shows only 20% of those students were successful.
Although there is a 20 percentage-point gap, both lines are going up. That means a higher percentage of the current first-year cohort successfully completed their required gateway courses compared to prior first-year cohorts, regardless of their academic achievement.
Next, let's look at one more metric to determine if the achievement gap between higher and lower achieving students widens or narrows depending on grades they earned for their gateway courses.
Opening the gateway grade filter displays the categories: A, B, C, D, Passed and Not Passed. The categories "Passed" and "Not Passed" are defined by your institution.
Let's click on "A" in the Math Gateway Grade and English Gateway Grade to see how that affects the achievement gap. It narrowed the gap significantly. The lower achieving students are within a few percentage points of the high achieving students.
Next, let's change the Gateway Grade to "B". The achievement gap has vanished between the lower and high achieving students.
If we change the Gateway Grade to "C", the gap has widened significantly between these two groups.
Finally, if we change the Gateway Grade to "D", we lose the high-performing students all together. Additionally, the completion rate for the lower-performing students has declined significantly.
Knowing the academic performance on gateway course completion rates can help you determine of lower achieving students need assistance.
We encourage you to continue exploring your institution's PDP dashboards to identify students who are performing well and those who might need additional support. Thank you for joining us.