Also known as the Leopard Success Project, this is a two-week preparation workshop designed to help students accelerate their developmental placement. Participating students take a diagnostic test in reading, writing, arithmetic, and algebra depending on their original placement test s
Temple College
Active in Achieving the Dream:
2009 - present
Leader College:
2012 - 2015
Leader College
Participating Institution
What We Are Doing:
Temple College has shifted its focus from access to success. The college has combatted the view by some on campus that, individually, many of its student success initiatives are temporary, by centralizing the various strategies around a theme of developmental education.
The college has created and continues to scale the following student success interventions:
- Zero Week: A week without classes that provides faculty and students time to prepare for the academic year. Zero Week is the week following registration and prior to the first day of classes each fall.
- Attendance Accountability—Peer Involvement Program: A modification to the college’s mandatory attendance policy created by the Student Success Division to address the specific needs of and challenges to students enrolled in developmental education.
- Continuous Student Orientation: Provides ongoing exposure to student and academic services throughout the semester; particularly targeted toward students in developmental English students.
Who We Are:
A spirit of equity has been embedded in the programs, policies and campus community culture of Temple College since it was founded in 1926. In the fall semester of 2009, 19% of Temple’s student population was African American, and another 19% were Hispanic. Fifty-five percent of the college’s first-time, first-year students received Pell grants.
Temple College encourages active learning through diverse instructional methods, enhancements in pedagogy, and advancements in online instruction. Temple College also plans to pursue systematic institutional improvements that will promote success for all students. The college has been collecting, aggregating and making available the results of various pertinent quantitative data.
Student Success Strategies
Temple College is using the following strategies to impact student success:
Continuous orientation is a strategy that provides students in sections most likely to enroll academically disadvantaged and first time in college students with exposure to student and academic services throughout the semester.
Fast tracked developmental courses are sections of sequenced developmental courses that are taught during two 8-week sessions for four days a week instead of the more traditional 16-week, 2-day a week course.
Retention Alert is a software system designed to assist with communication regarding student retention issues. Temple College adopted the system as an Achieving the Dream intervention in Fall 2011.
Zero-Week is a multi-faceted intervention designed to provide students and faculty with an enhanced first days of class experience. Zero-Week is a week without scheduled classes that provides faculty and students the time to prepare for the beginning of the semester and the academic year.
