By Kristy Firebaugh, Assistant Vice Provost for Student Success
February 24, 2025
On February 24, more than 50 faculty and staff from across the university gathered for the Winter Retention and Student Success Forum, focused on a pressing and complex issue: academic readiness. This quarterly forum, part of an ongoing series, is designed not just to share information but to spark collaborative, action-oriented dialogue around student success.
Why Academic Readiness?
The forum centered on the growing challenge of academic readiness—the foundational skills and mindsets students need to thrive in their courses. As faculty have observed, many students are arriving at DU with gaps in multiple areas, including content knowledge, study habits, critical thinking, and the ability to navigate the academic and social norms of higher education. This is part of a national trend exacerbated by the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and shifts in K-12 education.
What We’re Seeing
Both national data and DU data and observations point to a range of readiness-related challenges. Students are less prepared for the academic rigors of college than they were even just a few years ago.1 2
Here at DU, faculty have observed changes in course engagement, study skills, understanding of math concepts, and expectations around course workloads. These observations are backed up by student experience data: for example, we know from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) that DU students are spending less time reading, writing, and preparing for class than they did 10 years ago.
This chart shows DU First-Year Student Self-Reported NSSE Responses to academic experience questions from 2014-2024, demonstrating a downward trend in time spent on preparing for class, reading, and assigned writing.
During the forum, faculty and staff engaged in table discussions around subtopics such as math, writing, reading comprehension, study skills, and communication. Each group explored two guiding questions:
- What do students need to build foundational skills in this area?
- What do faculty need to support students with varying levels of readiness?
One major takeaway is that students must clearly understand the WHY behind pedagogical choices, and that faculty may need to make this more explicit to this generation of students than for students in the past.
Resources for faculty
The conversation also emphasized the need to provide resources and support to faculty as they work to address these evolving student needs. To that end, the following chart connects specific readiness challenges to faculty resources that already exist, many of them offered by the Office of Teaching and Learning. Work is ongoing to build out additional supports both for faculty and for students, so we can continue to ensure that students can thrive academically at DU.
| Student readiness challenge area | Related faculty resource |
| Writing skills | Writing Center faculty resources |
| Relationship and communication skills | OTL First Day of Class Guide |
| Critical thinking | OTL article: Creating Self-directed Learners |
| Class engagement | OTL resources: First Day of Class Guide Motivating students to come to class prepared Managing mobile devices Multitasking students |
| Study skills | Student success coaches- workshops, classroom visits, referrals Neurodiversity institute |
Want to learn more?
Want to be part of future forums about student success-related topics that affect faculty? Join the conversation on our Teams channel!
Contact Kristy Firebaugh, Assistant Vice Provost for Student Success, Kristy.firebaugh@du.edu
