Journal Club: Supporting 2YC-4YCU Transfer

Overview

This virtual group will explore resources, discuss challenges and opportunities that are relevant to individual participants' situations, and develop and share plans to better support their students in the transfer process. Participants will offer each other feedback on their plans.

Discussion series goals

The goal of these meetings is for each participant to find research-based strategies that they can implement to support their 2YC students in transferring to 4YCU programs and to develop a plan for implementation.

Structure and format

Prior to the first meeting:

Participants read the following three papers from Community College Review 2017, Vol. 45(4):
- Debra D. Bragg, 2017. Transfer Matters: Forward to the Special Issue on Transfer.
- John Fink and Davis Jenkins, 2017. Takes Two to Tango: Essential Practices of Highly Effective Transfer Partnerships.
- Xueli Wang, Seo Young Lee, and Amy Prevost, 2017. The Role of Aspirational Experiences and Behaviors in Cultivating Momentum for Transfer Access in STEM: Variations Across Gender and Race.
By 2 days before the 1^st meeting:
- Participants post a short reflection on our (password-protected) discussion board: what resonated most with you along with ideas of what you plan to do in regards to helping your students in the transfer process?
- Read and comment on other participants' posts.

1^st meeting:

Discussion of comments and ideas posed by the participants on the discussion board. Be prepared to report what you found helpful from the three articles above and what you plan to implement in your program / at your institution.

Prior to the second meeting:

Visit the SAGE 2YC resources on transfer
- Each participant reviews one of the sets of resources found under the subheadings. We set this up as a jigsaw, so that an equal number of participants review each of the following:
By 2 days before the meeting, each participant writes a short piece on the discussion board on
- What you read, including how you see the ideas/resources you reviewed fitting into your implementation plan for your own program / institution and what your next steps are in implementing your plan.
- Any ideas/resources you found that would be useful for the plans of others in the group.
Read and comment on other participants' posts.

2^ndmeeting:

Discussion of comments and ideas posed by the participants on the discussion board.

3^rd meeting:

Group members met to discuss progress on their plans from the previous meetings. Examples of these activities included:
- Partnering with the campus STEM Center in order to offer "drop in" workshops for students. The STEM Center already has a lot of student traffic through this office but has not offered much information / guidance for geoscience students in the past. The workshops included short presentations by geoscience instructors, as well as other STEM faculty, followed by one-on-one time with individual students. Themes for the workshops included: transfer planning and education mapping; identification of internships that are available to students; and helping students to develop their CV's and writing their personal statements.
- Developing a good working relation with the Chair of the Geology Department who organized and held a special event for geology students this past fall. The event included invited speakers from local environmental companies who came to talk about career opportunities for geology majors. In the past, most students majoring in geology needed to move away from the area / state after graduation in order to find work as a geologist. Through this evening event, students learned more about the connection between geology and local environmental science job opportunities. Fortuitously, three of the speakers for this event were past students from the local 2YC and could share their personal experiences with current 2YC students.
- Building on a current NSF-funded GeoPaths project, discussing plans for continuing the current activities (e.g. a summer bridge program with the local 4YC) which support students who are transferring to the local 4YC once the GeoPaths project comes to an end. Student cohorts in the current bridge program have had experiences working in collaborative research projects which gave them first-hand experience building their lab technical skills and learning about lab safety; working as a team to solve challenging problems; and gained access to a professional network of faculty and researchers from the 2YC and 4YC.

Timing

We scheduled the first two meetings of this series a few weeks apart, to allow time for faculty members to read and digest the material and to post their responses to the discussion board prior to each of the synchronous meetings. The third meeting was more than a month later, to give participants time to put their implementation plans into action and report on progress.

Additional resources

The SAGE 2YC resources on transfer include a collection of examples of NSF-funded GeoPaths Projects with an emphasis on supporting 2YC-4YCU transfer.

References

Bragg, Debra D. 2017. Transfer Matters: Forward to the Special Issue on Transfer. Community College Review 2017, Vol. 45(4).
Fink, John and Davis Jenkins, 2017. Takes Two to Tango: Essential Practices of Highly Effective Transfer Partnerships. Community College Review 2017, Vol. 45(4).
Wang, Xueli, Seo Young Lee, and Amy Prevost, 2017. The Role of Aspirational Experiences and Behaviors in Cultivating Momentum for Transfer Access in STEM: Variations Across Gender and Race. Community College Review 2017, Vol. 45(4).
Wolfe, Benjamin A. (2018). Introductory geosciences at the two-year college: Factors that influence student transfer intent with geoscience degree aspirations, Journal of Geoscience Education, 66:1, 36-54, DOI: 10.1080/10899995.2018.1411740.

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