Labouré College of Healthcare Pursues High-Touch Approach to Learner Success for Nursing Students Through the ACE Learner Success Lab

​October 2022

Labouré College of Healthcare is a private college in Milton, Massachusetts that specializes in nursing and health-care education. Labouré has the longest-running nursing education program in the Boston area and serves a primarily female adult learner population. Labouré joined the ACE Learner Success Laboratory (LSL) as a member of the inaugural cohort in 2020 to gather information about the nature and quality of students’ experiences and critically examine how to improve campus systems in order to best support nursing students and ensure their personal, professional, and academic success.  ​

​Goals 

Labouré’s main goal in joining the LSL was to establish a high-touch, completion-oriented approach to learner success in the associate of science in nursing program, taking into account how to best serve a diverse, adult student population. Ultimately, through a collaborative effort that mobilized their campus community and championed equity, access, and completion, the LSL leadership team at Labouré aimed to develop and implement a college-wide learner success plan.  

​Recommendations 

The three committees composing Laboure’s collaborative LSL team—the Data and Predictive Analytics Committee, the Faculty and Student Learning Communities Committee, and the Student Activities and Student Services Committee—made the following recommendations, stemming from their work in the LSL: 

  • Sustain the articulated goal of collecting data in support of the high-touch approach to advising and support for students, the college by increasing support for data collection and analytics, and for building longitudinal dashboards to track progress
  • Monitor the eight key performance indicators and associated initiatives that were established to provide the college with evidence of progress and inform decision-making processes
  • Include more external stakeholders and employers in its learner success initiatives going forward

​Outcomes  

Participating in the ACE Learner Success Lab paved the way for the following outcomes at Labouré College of Healthcare: 

  • ​Colleagues across admissions, student affairs, and nursing departments built an extremely close and collaborative environment that also included faculty and staff of other college-wide units and administration to coordinate a comprehensive learner success model.  
  • Labouré developed a working definition of learner success which will be reviewed and updated by the college community twice per year. 
  • Every professional nursing student will now be required to complete an academic excellence plan, which establishes individualized achievement goals from enrollment to completion. Students will be required to meet an assigned adviser three times per semester to check in on their academic achievement and offer support strategies to ensure success. 
  • Elements of the LSL are now integrated in the goals, initiatives, and tasks articulated in Labouré’s strategic plan. 
​“The ACE Learner Success Lab was instrumental in helping our faculty, staff, and administration innovate, adapt, and build capacity to ensure learner success at Labouré.”—Marilyn Gardner, Vice President of Institutional Effectiveness, Labouré College of Healthcare 

​Advice 

For institutions that are considering—or preparing for—​participation in the ACE Learner Success Lab, the Labouré College of Healthcare Lab leadership team emphasizes the importance of connecting as a cohort. In particular, they state that it is incredibly valuable for cohort members to make time among everyone’s busy schedules for reviewing and discussing some of the ACE signature research projects, the status of significant policy issues, and other resources provided and identified through the LSL. Labouré’s Lab team indicated that they learned so much from connecting with their fellow cohort members around these issues. ​

​The ACE Learner Success Lab 

The Learner Success Lab is an inclusive learning community that integrates evidence-based practices for persistence and completion, life design and career exploration, and workforce skills development to assist participating institutions in developing a comprehensive strategy for learner success. 

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