Current Work

ASCEND Initiative

Portland State University’s ASCEND Initiative is an overarching framework designed to support first-year and transfer students as they move through year one at PSU. ASCEND outlines a comprehensive approach to providing structured and proactive guidance to students to support their educational goals, connect academic pursuits to post-college plans, and create more intentional support in time-to-degree and credit momentum.

Multiple partners and projects listed below are part of the ASCEND Initiative. Click "Read More" to find out more about ASCEND and see a list of the projects involved.

Academic Planning for Equitable Success

Ad Astra+AASCU will provide an opportunity to engage with colleagues from other schools who are interested in improving their approach to creating balanced, effective course schedules. It provides an opportunity to learn and discuss best practices and solutions. In addition, Ad Astra will provide technical and data analysis assistance in helping PSU and other participating institutions address this barrier through a process of preparing, reflecting, prioritizing, acting, and monitoring. The main goal of the Academic Planning for Equitable Success project is to address the course schedule barrier, close equity gaps, maximize resources, and improve efficiencies

Academic Supports

To provide academic support to students enrolled in courses with historically lower completion rates or courses considered to be large gateway STEM courses, the Office of Student Success and the Learning Center have collaborated to provide embedded academic support. For the purposes of this pilot, embedded academic support utilizes peer tutors to deliver high-quality academic support to students.

Academic Warning Workshop/Probation Intervention

This workgroup was formed to revise the existing Academic Warning Workshop. Looking carefully at student feedback, data trends, and success metrics, it was apparent that a redesign was essential to accomplish the workshop’s goals. The launch of the new Academic Warning Workshop was at the end of the summer 2023 term.

Access, Complete, Connect, Engage (ACCE) Grant

PSU was awarded $7,823,199 million to fund the Access, Connect, Complete, Engage (ACCE) program in partnership with Clackamas Community College (CCC) and Mt. Hood Community College (MHCC) to serve 2,000 transfer students. This approach includes clear transfer pathways, integrated coaching, direct financial aid, and data driven evaluation. ACCE aims to tackle systemic barriers to academic success for underserved transfer students, reducing disparities in post-secondary outcomes across PSU and partnering community colleges. The program has officially launched and the team aims to have coaches hired, trained, and ready to give services to MHCC and CCC students this upcoming Winter 2025!

Active Learning Classrooms

This project will collect data from PSU faculty to better understand what active learning activities are taking place in our classrooms. With this data, we will amplify the engaging pedagogies used in our classrooms, identify the gaps that exist between existing active learning techniques faculty are using (or would like to use) and physical classroom configurations. This analysis will be compiled along with recommendations for development of a “PSU Active Learning Classroom” standard that would meet the needs of the highest priority use cases and that could be requested by faculty through normal classroom assignment processes, in addition to informing professional development opportunities.

Advising Strategic Plan

Undergraduate Academic Advising (UAA) is undergoing a strategic planning process that will align with the mission and vision of UAA as well as the PSU in 2030 Vision and Strategic Imperatives and the Embracing our Majority BIPOC Future framework. The goal of the UAA strategic plan is to create a cohesive and collective vision for academic advising at PSU. The Advising Strategic Plan will center the needs of our current and future PSU students to ensure their success; improve the experience of advisors and advising leadership resulting in a collaborative and positive work environment and culture; and operationalize recommendations from the external assessment by NACADA and internal assessment group.

Cohort Model for Portland Scholars

This initiative supports Portland Scholars during their first year at PSU with a goal of improving outcomes for first-year students who enroll with a high school GPA below 3.0. Through the cohort model, students will develop community, belonging, and academic identity. Cohort models and early academic integration have been shown to increase retention.Students involved in a cohort often exhibit increased campus engagement and express greater overall satisfaction and a strong sense of belonging. This project aims to create a cohort for conditionally admitted students that will span three terms of Student Success FRINQ pilots. Through this cohort model, students will receive an enhanced support system throughout their first year at PSU.

Degree Planner

The College Source uAchieve Degree Planner is an academic planning technology solution for students that leverages existing degree audit data to create personalized term recommendations leading to graduation. The uAchieve academic planning system includes degree audit, planning, and schedule-building components that work together to maximize credit applicability and ensure students have accurate, complete, and personalized information to achieve their educational goals on time and on their terms. The degree planning tool will enhance academic advising through transparency in student planning and advisor feedback on degree plans.

Early Alerts

The Early Alerts workgroup is focused on increasing faculty participation in Early Alerts. The workgroup is focusing on how to close the loop with faculty each term, and how to best provide quarterly status reports. Additional work is being done to make Early Alerts data accessible so that it can be shared more regularly. The leadership team has synthesized insights gathered over the past two years to develop a proposal outlining the essential components for a sustainable Early Alerts program at PSU.

Emergency Aid Pilot

At PSU, there is not a streamlined, single process for students to request emergency aid. Current processes have different intake, eligibility, and access points which results in inequity. At times, a hardship request is completed, only to find that the student is not eligible based on their financial aid award. Meanwhile, multiple solutions (spreadsheets, paper forms, email, and databases) are used to move the request along. Finally, there is no visible centralized way for students to initiate a request. This project seeks to create a student-centered, equitable process that improves access, removes barriers and stigma, and fosters connection to campus supports and resources.

First-Year Advising Requirement Hold Removal Pilot

The purpose of this pilot is to minimize unintended consequences of the First Year Mandatory Advising (FYMA) registration hold that is placed on a student's impact on equitable student success. It intends to test the mechanism of the registration hold to enforce the requirement and not to test the efficacy of the First Year Advising Requirement.

First-Year Inquiry for Student Success

The purpose of this project is to redesign Portland State University’s three-term course First-Year Inquiry (FRINQ) to embed supportive services and student success measures directly in the curriculum. Our goals are to create a FRINQ curriculum where every student knows what support is available on campus by embedding advising, registration, financial aid, career readiness, wellness, belonging, etc., into the curriculum, to use FRINQ as a site where students can meet and build relationships with academic professionals from across campus who are ready to assist them, and to develop proactive processes for identifying and supporting students who are at risk of not passing or completing FRINQ.

Incoming Student Questionnaire

The Incoming Student Questionnaire will help identify first-year students who may benefit from additional support and extended onboarding before the academic year begins. The goal of the Questionnaire is to help students who may have additional challenges in their path to graduation and align a student's academic major with their professional aspirations. Additionally, the questionnaire will assess if a student has taken all the necessary steps and actions to enroll in classes. With the Incoming Student Questionnaire, we hope to further support students by assessing and addressing student needs and challenges before classes even begin.

Integrated Course Scheduling for Departments (Ad Astra Implementation)

The Ad Astra Course Scheduling software uses data to optimize and streamline scheduling, offering real-time insights and creating efficiencies by eliminating manual and time-consuming processes. This software will provide staff and academic units with dynamic data and improved digital tools to support class scheduling. The system offers real-time class registration monitoring for academic programs, identifying courses that need additional sections or courses to consider for cancellation, making it easier for departments to meet student needs and demands.

Math Start

The Math Start initiative will strive to address various student success metrics for students who test in developmental math courses. PSU data indicates that full-time first-year students who test at Math 95 or lower persist at a rate 15% lower than their peers. The Math Start Initiative aims to determine if there are alternatives to Math 95 at PSU and a viable option for students placed into Math 95 or below to start at college-level math.

Motivate Lab: Student Voices Initiative

The Student Voices Initiative centers student-led focus groups to examine students' sense of academic and social belonging at PSU and other higher education institutions and provides recommendations for system-change, with a particular focus on supporting historically marginalized student groups.

Onboarding

This project aims to implement a clear, comprehensive, and consistent onboarding experience for first year and transfer students during their first year at PSU. With a supportive plan in place, students will know who their ‘success’ team is and the knowledge and access to resources that support student success. This project is a collaborative effort between Advising & Career Services and the Transfer & Returning Student Resource Center.

Portland Scholars

Portland Scholars is a three-week summer program followed by a year-long academic workshop that supports early access to campus resources, community, and academic coursework to ease the transition from high school/community college to college.

SINQ Curriculum Redesign

The purpose of this project is to redesign Portland State University’s Sophomore Inquiry (SINQ) curriculum to foster community and embed career exploration and research/writing support. This project was initiated to address the DFW rates in SINQ classes, particularly for those students who take classes online, as research indicates that students who take online SINQs have higher DFW rates than students who take in-person SINQs. At PSU about 45% of students take an online SINQ. A broader impact of this project is to further communicate the impact and value of general education and identify how the SINQ classes support students at PSU and their degree path. The project was further initiated to address a UNST budget cut for 2025-26. The revised budget necessitated the cut of online mentors by 50 percent, which will require a redesign of the online mentor program to have a smaller and more focused role for online mentors, concentrating on student success, career readiness, and writing support.

SMS Chatbot - Victor E. Bot

Student Success has partnered with EdSights to implement a campus-wide SMS chatbot that can serve as a first-line problem solving and wayfinding tool for students. The goal of this project is to provide students with a convenient way to find answers to questions, get automated and tailored messages aimed at improving connection to PSU, and creating a mechanism for student success staff to provide additional support —thereby increasing overall student engagement and persistence.

Student Wayfinding Task Force

The Student Wayfinding Task Force is a standing workgroup focused on coordinating student service delivery across administrative units, primarily located in Fariborz Maseeh Hall. After commissioning and completing several initial projects, the task force will be reviewing the previous charge and developing a new charter focused on:

Inter-departmental relationship building
Process improvements for front-line service units
Ongoing data collection and analysis related to service and support

Time Grid

This project aims to review our current time grid by engaging academic units and students in understanding their class meeting pattern needs to see if adjustments can be made to improve the grid and see how we can reduce off-grid. The goal is to recommend a scheduling policy or guidelines that offer optimal meeting patterns to support students and restrict off-grid scheduling.

Virtual First Stop

This project will replace the existing CampusNexus service email inbox that is currently used by the Registrar’s Office, Student Financial Services, and Financial Aid with Jira Service Management. This will allow for more effective collaboration between units and move these core student support units to a more modern tool with additional customer support features that could be implemented in the future.