4.5 Office of the Dean of the College

The Office of the Dean of the College (ODOC) is a major source of student information. ODOC houses several key data partners including the Office of Academic Advising, the Writing Center, Pre-Orientation programming, undergraduate scholarship programs (e.g. the Magnolia Scholars), and undergraduate research programming.

4.5.1 Office of Academic Advising

Monthly Logs

The Office of Academic Advising (OAA) serves a variety of purposes and thus supplied several pieces of data to the Office of Institutional Research. This office assists students with their primary registration, conducts pre-orientation, and works with students who are experiencing academic difficulty. This office is also a check point for students wishing to transfer. Each month Debbie Lafferty will send the Office of Institutional Research data scientist the log file with the visits from the the previous month. These monthly log files can then be saved to the LSDS directory in the /oaa_logs directory. The script mentioned below will combine all of the OAA files together

Academic Advising Monthly Log ETL

Parameter	Response
Description	Office of Academic Advising Logs
Contact	Debbie Lafferty
Contact Office	Office of Academic Advising
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	Debbie sends email with file which is saved to the "oaa_los" folder
Frequency of Update	Monthly
Record Type	month
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort file_4_OAA_prep_dev.sas
Output Data Set Name	oaa_combined
QA Program (if Applicable)	Compare with Debbie's summaries

Be sure to update the term dates in the file (e.g. when a new term starts and stops).

OAA Combination Program

The next program is used to combine legacy OAA records with new OAA records that have been compiled from the above routine. A key point is to ensure that you have written out all of the term dates (e.g. when the term begins and ends in this file). This program parses the OAA visits, the details regarding the visits and counts each unique daily visit by student and assigns it to each term. The outputted data set contains one record per student per term with the number of unique daily visits to the OAA.

Academic Advising Combined Records ETL

param	response
Description	Office of Acad Advising Office Records
Contact	Debbie Lafferty
Contact Office	Office of Academic Advising
Input File Type	NA
Method of Retrieval	Run Building FR cohort file_4_OAA_prep_dev.sas to build
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	term
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort file_4_acad_support.sas
Output Data Set Name	XACAD_SUPPORT (OAA)
QA Program (if Applicable)	Built in Proc Freqs

Be sure to update the term dates in the file (e.g. when a new term starts and stops).

Adviser Letter

Each year the first year students are asked to write a letter introducing themselves to their Lower Division Adviser.¹⁰ In this letter, the student introduce themselves, their interests, and their fears and aspirations while at Wake Forest. Currently these data are not combined with the LSDS as is. Future research could include text analysis on these letters. Such text analysis could include not only sentiment analysis, but could also include more advanced natural language processing techniques like the association between lexical content and predicted first term GPA to identify students needing additional writing support.

Dear Adviser ETL

param	response
Description	Adviser Letter
Contact	Shannon McKinney
Contact Office	Office of Academic Advising
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	File sent on request
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	student
ETL File Name	NA
Output Data Set Name	NA
QA Program (if Applicable)	NA

4.5.2 Writing Center

The Writing Center is a standing center for students to assist students with their writing. This includes one-on-one consultations with student and staff tutors. The original data contain a lot of information including when the student set up appointments, if they show up, what they plan on discussing, their perceptions of their own writing, and also the comments of the tutor. Currently, only the visits per student are aggregated and included in the LSDS. Thus we calculate the unique visits per student per term to the Writing Center. Future research could include investigating these comments and notes about self perception and then include them in the LSDS in some why.

This is also one of the few data sources that we can pull ourselves. Discuss with Ryan Shirey, the head of the Writing Center, and request administrative access to pull these records.

Retrieving the Data

Again, contact Ryan Shirey or someone in the Writing Center to gain the correct administrative writing to the data. When you have rights go to the Writing Center website at https://writingcenter.wfu.edu/. Select the “Schedule” button (see Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1: Writing Center Schedule Link

You will then be re-directed to a sign-in page. Enter your credentials (these are separate from your normal WFU LDAP credentials) as shown in Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2: Writing Center Sign-In

Now you can navigate to the drop-down, select “System Utilities & Reports” and then “System Data Export” as shown in Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.3: Writing Center Export Drop-Down

You will then be prompted to select a date range (generally speaking you will try to include an entire term) as shown in Figure 4.4. You can then export the data and save it to the \\admin2\instres\IR Shared Folder for Retention Analysis directory.

Figure 4.4: Writing Center Export Date Range Selection

Updating the LSDS with this Data

After these data have been collected they can be combined with the described files in ??

Writing Center ETL

param	response
Description	Writing Center
Contact	Ryan Shirey
Contact Office	Writing Center
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	https://wfu.mywconline.com/index.php?logout=YES
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	term
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort file_4_acad_support.sas
Output Data Set Name	XACAD_SUPPORT (writing)
QA Program (if Applicable)	Built in Proc Freqs

Be sure to update the term dates in the file (e.g. when a new term starts and stops).

4.5.3 Pre-Orientation Participation

Each summer prior to the start of the Fall term admitted students (who generally enroll) have the option of attending a Pre-Orientation Program. Pre-orientation programming allows for students to engage in campus activities with incoming students prior to enrollment (e.g. a wilderness exploration trip, community service projects). Important to note is that each program has a participation fee.¹¹ In some cases (e.g. Magnolia Scholars) this fee was waived. These data are only available from the entering cohort for the fall of 2013 forward. These programs occur the week or so before move-in day on campus. Initial research has shown the pre-orientation is important for students to form early connection with their peers.

This data set outputs for each student by term a flag for each of the types of pre-orientation programming that they attended. Generally, a student can only attend one pre-orientation event, but in prior years international students could attend an orientation program prior to pre-orientation and may appear more than once in these data.

Pre-Orientation ETL

param	response
Description	Pre-Orientation Participation
Contact	Cherise James
Contact Office	Office of the Dean of the College
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	File sent on request
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	student
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort file_4_pre_orientation.sas
Output Data Set Name	Xpre_orientation
QA Program (if Applicable)	NA

Be sure to check if new programs are added to Pre-Orientation programming! Existing programming is currently hard-coded and new programs will need to added to the sas program.

These data are only available for the Fall 2013 cohort forward!

4.5.4 Magnolia Scholars

The Magnolia Scholars program is a scholarship and support program that provides roughly 100 first generation college students with financial and scholastic support.¹² Institutional Research assists Advancement and the Magnolia Scholars program with facts to support the 10 Million dollar endowment that was given the University in 2018 to support the Magnolia Scholars.

Magnolia Scholars ETL

param	response
Description	Magnolia Scholar Information
Contact	Jake Geller-Goad
Contact Office	Office of the Dean of the College
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	File sent on request
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	student
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort_file_4_mag_scholars
Output Data Set Name	xmag_scholars
QA Program (if Applicable)	NA

4.5.5 Undergraduate Research Participation

Undergraduates are afforded the opportunity to participate in research on campus through the EURECA and EURECAx programs.¹³

These data includes those students who participated by term.

Undergraduate Research ETL

param	response
Description	EURECA Undergrad Research Participation
Contact	Tammy Burke
Contact Office	Office of the Dean of the College
Input File Type	Excel File
Method of Retrieval	File sent on request
Frequency of Update	Term
Record Type	term
ETL File Name	Building FR cohort_file_4_uereca.sas
Output Data Set Name	xeureca
QA Program (if Applicable)	NA

Students at Wake Forest do not declare a major until the end of their sophomore year. As such they are advised by a diverse group of Lower Division Advisers which could include faculty and staff.↩
See complete details at https://newstudents.wfu.edu/gettingstarted/pre-orientation-programs/↩
See https://magnoliascholars.wfu.edu/program-overview for more details on the program.↩
See https://ureca.wfu.edu/ for details↩