academic success coaching: user research

the program

academic success coaching is a uw resource offering 1:1, peer-led, interactive appointments for students to build strategies for academic success. common meeting topics: time management, study strategies, goal setting, motivation, test anxiety, campus resources.

my job title was program assistant — keeping the program running smoothly, managing the social media, and making sure students and coaches had a good overall experience. the research was something i took on from the inside.

the design question, after it evolved

how can we improve the process of the academic success coaching program to better serve students and coaches at uw?

it didn’t start there. it began as “how can we improve access to, or make better use of, academic support resources at uw?” and narrowed across three revisions before it landed on process, students, and coaches together.

research process

• 01 — field observations. three 30-minute observations of coaching sessions, which needed consent from my supervisors, the coaches, and the students. i wrote field notes and built an affinity diagram from them.
• 02 — interviews. two coach interviews and one student interview, recruited by email, transcribed and coded.
• 03 — survey. a comprehensive end-of-quarter survey sent to every student who attended a coaching session in fall ’21 — a quantitative check that confirmed the qualitative findings.

how the observations got analysed

the field notes went onto a board and clustered into two branches, which is the diagram at the top of this page.

• body language and the built environment — eye contact and eye movement, fidgeting, body placement, seating, talking with hands, and the room itself.
• coach–student interaction — student behaviour, coach behaviour, humor, mirroring, language, follow-up email, and technology use.

three insights came out of it, and they’re the teal notes on the board:

• students fidget consistently throughout sessions.
• seating choices are related to the student’s eye contact and eye movement — the one that changed practice.
• technology use is inconsistent, and rarely used as a tool during sessions.

i want to be precise about the middle one, because it’s the finding i lean on most. three 30-minute observations is a small base, and what i had was a correlation plus a plausible mechanism — that the height difference between a desk chair and a table chair sets up a power dynamic. that was enough to justify a cheap, reversible change. it would not have been enough to justify an expensive one.

what changed because of it

this is the part i’m proudest of: every finding turned into something the program actually did differently.

• seating choice. eye contact correlated with which type of chair the coach and student were sitting in — the likely explanation being the power dynamic created by different seating heights. coaches are now advised to “sit at the same level”, meaning both on table chairs or both on desk chairs. it went into the 2022 fall orientation deck.
• warmth. the coaching offices were decluttered, given warm lighting, and personal touches added.
• needs and resources. notepads, pens, and fidget toys were provided — the fidget toys have been a hit with students and coaches alike.
• time management resources. the survey showed time management was both the most common reason for an appointment and the resource students most wanted. that became extensive resource binders and more time management workshops.

reflections

• findings build on each other
• access is important, so account for it
• improving something you care about feels good
• let the research inspire you to make change

the through-line to my research

this job is where the grades research started, though i didn’t know it at the time. i spent two years listening to students describe their academic standing — gpas, thresholds, probation, what a grade would mean for their aid — and it became obvious the number was doing enormous work in their lives that nobody was examining.

the line from here to undergraduate student critical literacy with grades is direct. i also came back to this program as a guest speaker in hcde 313 to talk about continuous re-design, which is how i’d describe the whole two years.