Our Philosophy
NASH TS3TS3 Overview
TS3 is a degree completion initiative led by a collaborative of higher education systems and campuses who are members of the National Association of System Heads. TS3 is based on the principles of collective impact and improvement science, and leverages student success interventions that are proven to promote student success, particularly for students of color, low-income and non-traditional students. By aligning student success efforts across systems and the campuses that compose them with a series of evidence-based practices, NASH hopes to create economies of scale and scope that lead to demonstrable gains in completions.
Systemness
Systemness, or the idea that the whole can be more than the sum of its parts, is the fundamental concept that drives our work. Rather than seeing systems as collections of disparate actors, we believe that systems can be coordinated actors that leverage their power to convene and facilitate, along with their governing and policy making authority, to build collaborations to support students and campuses; rather than trying to mediate competitive actions.
Collective Impact
Collective impact brings people together, in a structured way, to achieve social change. It starts with collectively defining a problem and creating a shared vision to solve the problem. It also means elevating voices, participatory action and establishing shared measurement, allowing for continuous quality improvement.
Improvement Science
Drawing from Improvement science, NASH cultivates Networked Improvement Communities (NICs) through its participants and TS3 members, providing a framework for deeper, networked collaboration to improve student success and college completion.
Our Interventions
Since its inception in 2014, NASH TS3 has focused on these interventions
High Impact Practices (HIPs)
Despite their proven, positive impact on retention, persistence, and completion, high impact practices (HIPs) are generally only accessible to a small subgroup of high-achieving students. Moreover, because they are defined unevenly across campuses, assessing and comparing quality is difficult. Over the past decade, higher education has embraced the use of high-impact educational practices like learning communities, service learning, undergraduate research, and peer mentoring for their significant contributions to learning as well as student persistence. TS3’s collective work helps systems take these high impact practices to scale, making them accessible and meaningful for all students, with an eye to both quality and equity.
Redesigned Math Pathways
Entry level math courses continue to be barriers to student success. Many TS3 campuses are addressing this challenge with innovate redesign of developmental and entry-level math courses. Partners have experimented and seen success with several approaches, including launching curricula targeted for specific audiences, replacing remedial math with co-remediation, opting for a problem-solving focus (over merely skill-building), and incorporating new, engaging teaching methodologies into all math courses. While we still face the challenge of scaling these practices, doing so will make them the norm on our campuses.
Predictive Analytics
Lack of or confusing information about academic progress hinders the success of all students, and particularly students of color, low-income, and first-generation students. Work across many TS3 systems and campuses proves that predictive analytics and data-mining techniques can be powerful methods of empowering and informing students, helping them chart their own success. TS3’s predictive analytics initiative provides tools and practices to scale predictive analytics across multiple campuses, strengthen the data infrastructure needed to leverage analytics tools, and develop the policy, curricular advances, and academic support programs critical to the successful use of predictive analytics.
Equity
All aspects of TS3 work reflect an equity-minded approach to student success. Our equity commitment includes providing relevant supports to ensure that all students have high outcomes and that identity no longer predicts student success or failure. Our work entails addressing root causes of inequities, not just their manifestations, in part through eliminating policies, practices, attitudes, and cultural messages that reinforce or fail to eliminate differential outcomes by identity.
Transfer
In response to this evolving national context, NASH is expanding the commitment of its TS3 initiative to include transfer, in recognition of the opportunities posed by successful transfer to support equitable access to, persistence through, and completion of high-quality degree programs across student populations and demographics. This expansion further leverages the foundational role university systems play in improving student transfer and removing structural barriers by: mobilizing their size and scale to coordinate and foster collaboration, pathways and portability of credits across institutions; utilizing data and analytics with a particular focus on identifying and closing equity gaps and improving student outcomes; rethinking curricula and academic and extra-academic support for transfer students; and by taking advantage of their policy-making and -informing capacities at multiple levels (institutional, system, state and state agency, and federal).