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.
Transcript
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?
Before we continue, please remember that the results and trends shown in this tutorial are for demonstration purposes and can-not be applied to your institution. Please review your institution's data before drawing conclusions.
This is the Home Page for the Postsecondary Data Partnership dashboards. The Gateway Course Completion dashboard is one of the early momentum metrics. Clicking that icon takes you to the dashboard.
In order to understand the relationship between two variables, like GPA and Gateway Course Completion Rate, you need to apply the GPA dimension. Click "Select Dimension" and then select GPA range.
The lines in the upper right line chart represent completion rates for each GPA range.
In addition, a section for each GPA range is shown in the lower left bar char.
But the lower right 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 upper right 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 the higher and the lower ranges.
To do that, click on the global filter called GPA range, and deselect "All." Now, select GPA ranges 2.0 to 2.5 and 3.5 to 4.0 then click "Apply."
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.
The Gateway Grade is next to the Dimension drop-down. Opening the 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 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.