College Guidance, Preparation, and Success

North Carolina introduces virtual public schools that help students graduate early. The majority of America’s public schools have access to the internet and utilize technology in some meaningful way. Virtual education is become the fastest growing sector of education. North Carolina is recognizing the potential online learning has for its students and has announced the statewide North Carolina Virtual Public School program that allows students to take online courses allowing them to earn college credits and graduate early from high school. The online courses also promote college preparation and easier transition to higher education. To learn more visit http://www.ncvps.org/

With ThroughCollege, BrainReactions conducted a study with the purpose to identify ways to innovate the way college guidance can happen for high school students. Currently the ratio of over 400 high school students for every one school counselor leaves much opportunity for innovation of college guidance: both incremental improvements to the way it is currently done and more innovative solutions which represent significant changes. With advancements in technology and knowledge, there should be opportunities to improve college guidance for students, and this exploratory study sought those ideas.

In the spring of 2008 a second focus group and brainstorm were conducted on the topic of innovating college guidance counseling for high school students. This brainstorm included 7 different idea generators who shared their experiences, their ideas, and their own individual analysis with a survey after the session. The lead researcher and an analyst made meaning of the ideas and individual analysis to identify best ideas for future practice and themes that were important based on the perspectives of the idea generator participants.

This study was conducted as a result of findings from the first study, namely that the opportunity for innovating college guidance involved  helping students to a) discover themselves and what they wanted to do and become, b) utilize the internet (especially Facebook, YouTube, etc.) and resources for college guidance activities, and c) to better engage in the process of college planning with stronger relationships.

The topic areas this second study focused on included more specific idea generating questions. Significant focus group and brainstorming questions posed were:

1. What was your own college guidance experience like?

2. What are the problems with existing college & career guidance for High School students?

3. What could a better and amazing college guidance system feature?

4. How can you help High School students figure out who they are: what their strengths, interests, values, etc. are so that they can make better college and life choices?

5. If there were a new system for college guidance, how could you use the especially the internet to increase awareness about it and get people to use it?

6. How would you increase the amount of high school and college students using a Facebook application and get educators to use this with students?

7. What are ideas for new activities that would help students with their self learning, and preparing for a peak college experience?

This report can be downloaded from the ThroughCollege Educator Resources page.

Author: Darin Eich, Ph.D.