Planning ahead
Another company making inroads in the college and career-planning arena is Hobsons, the Arlington, Va.-based developer of Naviance. Dan Obregon, vice president of marketing, said the company takes a “holistic approach to college planning that incorporates self-awareness (on the student’s part) and then aligns that with academic plans.” At the Naviance platform’s core is the “College Power Score,” which Obregon said “helps students plan which courses they want to take in middle and high school.”
Then, based on the rigor of that course plan, the platform makes recommendations like, “Hey, it looks like you’re on track to go to a highly-selective college or university,” or, “Based on your course record, it looks like you have a fair shot at a selective college but if you step it up in a couple of key areas to increase your academic rigor you’ll be on a path to a more selective institution, if so desired.”
Along with offering guidance to individual students, the platform also helps facilitate conversations between pupils and school counselors. “With the high student-to-counselor ratio in many schools, these conversations don’t always happen,” said Obregon. “Using technology, we’ve automated that very manual, paper-based process for schools and districts, giving them early/actionable insights that they can use to handle counselors’ overwhelming caseloads.”
Testing the waters
DeBlieux is one superintendent that is in favor of using technology to help facilitate those conversations and get students thinking about their colleges choices at an early age. After learning about vibeffect at a recent Association of Latino Administrators and Superintendents conference, she started thinking about how it could benefit the K-8 students at her district’s 12 schools.
“We want to give students the tools they need to make informed decisions and to help them prepare for college and/or a career,” said DeBlieux. “As part of that mission, I’ve been working with one of our district’s councils to introduce vibeffect to our eighth grade students.” In January, she plans to kick off the initiative while also working with her feeder high school to “move this along for the students in our community.”
Cox said vibeffect is working on several new initiatives of its own, all of them centered on helping students “get to the right place and into the right mindset” to succeed in school. “If we can do more of this, and if we can use scientific models to reinforce our efforts—rather than the current, somewhat nebulous system that finds people making this very important decision from a position of weakness,” Cox said, “then we’re achieving our goal.”
Bridget McCrea is a contributing writer for eSchool News.
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