Detection of Academic Early Warning Signs and Effective Intervention “Takes a Village”

Abstract

Early intervention for students at risk of academic difficulty can be more effectively accomplished using a team-based approach that capitalizes on the expertise of many in a pharmacy education community. Authored by members of the Big Ten Alliance Pharmacy Assessment Collaborative, this commentary advocates for better integration of assessment professionals, pharmacy faculty, and student support services to capture academic, accountability, and behavior-related data that might signal student intellectual and/or behavioral challenges and manifest as marginal academic performance. Assessment professionals can assist with creating data dashboards/monitoring systems, recognizing trends within the data, refining formulas to identify at-risk students, and measuring the impact of interventions to determine which approaches positively and significantly influence outcomes. Effective early warning and intervention takes a village and should go beyond narrowly focused attempts that fail to account for the complexity of students as individuals or fail to acknowledge the multifaceted skill set students are expected to develop to become competent and responsible pharmacists.