Improve Student Retention with Dropout Prediction

High-quality education, a student support system, qualified faculty, and top-notch facilities are some of the crucial things that students expect from institutes. The best educational institutes strive to facilitate an enriching educational experience by providing all of the above and more.

However, they still witness declining academic growth and increasing drop-outs, which may affect their reputation. So, whose fault is it? Is the institute responsible for failing to meet the learning requirements? Advanced tools like the campus management system help find the answer to such questions.

In fact, It Is an Immensely Effective Tool That Helps to Improve the Student Retention Rate. But how? Let us find out:

The modern methods of credit management require frequent evaluations and handling of large amounts of student data regularly. Conducting the process can be tedious for faculty and prone to errors. It can be made simpler with the help of ERP tools.

Streamlining Student Attendance

There is an unmissable connection between a student’s progress and their attendance rate, a fact that has received undue importance in recent times. However, the traditional attendance system is paper-based and outdated, requiring teachers to spend extra time and effort.

On the contrary, if institutes have a CMS (Campus Management System), it helps to streamline attendance-related activities in the following ways:

• Automates the attendance-taking process, which eliminates the manual process and saves time and effort.
• It provides a digital platform to store student attendance data.
• Teachers can track student attendance conveniently.
• They can compile and contrast the monthly student attendance data simultaneously.
• They can easily identify individual attendance patterns in terms of the rate of absences and present days without going through manual data.
• Timely tracking of absenteeism enables teachers to take the necessary mitigation steps.

Monitoring Academic Performance

The core objective of an educational institute is not just to conduct classes and examinations and then promote them to the next level (class). Their goal is to provide wholesome development for the students.

Therefore, moving beyond the exam-centric approach is necessary, and that is why most institutes have been emphasizing a student-centric system. The primary focus is to ensure the progress of students through a well-thought-out strategy.

That is where the Learning Management System (LMS) proves to be an ideal educational assistive tool, and when we integrate it with CMS, it becomes the perfect combination to observe student performance. Summative assessments are not the only way teachers can determine their growth.

In fact, the system helps them track their ongoing progress and enables them to match the attendance data with the performance reports. As a result, they get a complete picture of a particular student's academic abilities.

It helps them identify the at-risk students based on the reports; they can also determine the areas in which they have been struggling.

Bridges the Communication Gap to Retain Students

Teachers try their best to create a friendly and balanced learning environment in the classroom, yet a communication gap persists with some students. For example, some students fail to share information about the current happenings in school or college with their parents.

Furthermore, underperforming students are more likely to miss classes due to a lack of motivation and support systems. Simultaneously, some of the other students might be dealing with personal issues that affect their academic lives.

Teachers and institutes can play a key role in helping to reduce dropout rates. Although they cannot intrude on their personal lives, they can provide timely intervention in the following ways:

• Establish a better parent-teacher relationship via timely communication.
• Teachers can send personalized feedback to individual students, highlighting the areas they need to work on.
• They can send links to tutorials and assignment resources through emails and text messages to help them in the learning process.
• Teachers can use the communication platform of the system to send updates about attendance to individual parents.
• Teachers, parents, and administrators can work together to identify the major issues behind the frequent absenteeism and encourage students to attend classes.

Using Analytics to Predict Drop-Outs

We are aware that an attendance register enables teachers to record daily attendance and maintain it manually. However, there is no way of determining which student will drop out in the upcoming days.

Furthermore, with thousands of students in an institute, it is challenging to keep track of the attendance patterns of individual students. Fortunately, we can rely on tools like the Student Management System, which helps to organize all student-related information without any difficulty.

In fact, the system comes with smart analytics features, helping to provide the best advantages as follows:

• Teachers can retrieve accurate reports related to student activity, including their assessments, grades, attendance, and ongoing progress reports.
• The reports provide detailed information about underperforming and regularly absent students. Therefore, they might be on the verge of dropping out.
• Predicting the drop-outs could be followed by developing appropriate plans to connect with the students and taking the necessary measures.

Personalized Mentoring

Not receiving sufficient help, support, and guidance is the primary reason why many students fail to perform well in class. Also, continued poor performance leads to a lack of motivation and low self-esteem, ultimately resulting in dropping out.

Teachers can step in to provide much-needed motivation to the students with the help of a strategic plan. For instance, personalized mentoring and learning plans are essential to identifying students’ problems. Hence, they can:

• Utilize the varied learning tools of the campus management system to conduct one-to-one feedback sessions with individual students.
• Use the analytic reports to determine their strengths and weaknesses.
• Identify the strengths of the at-risk students, including their skills.
• Prepare personalized learning plans, helping the students learn a lesson or a subject topic at their own pace.

Student Retention Strategies

Why should the institute even bother to develop strategies to retain students when they themselves don’t aim for academic achievement? Firstly, it is wrong to assume that they don’t want to aim for academic excellence.

Secondly, if the teaching and learning system is less conducive to strengthening their abilities and does not engage students, it leads to low retention rates. Therefore, they can prioritize retention strategies that include:

• Incorporating an inclusive learning environment, wherein teachers put equal emphasis on all students' interests and requirements,
• Establishing a sense of community will help them feel a sense of belonging.
• Implementing engaging in-class activities, including experiential learning opportunities.
• Ensure offline and online classes are equally engaging with the help of varied activities that suit and complement the platforms.