Building Community in Community Colleges: Digital Student Study Networks

CircleIn, an app that uses game design to provide incentives for students to build a strong study habit, received a National Science Foundation
(NSF) Phase I grant to tackle the key element of community. Monroe Community College (MCC) partnered with CircleIn, implementing the app
in mid-spring 2020 term just when COVID-19 necessitated a transition to remote learning. Knowing that classroom community is related to
student course persistence, MCC wanted to offer students an instant, equitable academic community for each course. Early findings at MCC
indicate that CircleIn appeared to provide a classroom community that all students could access, regardless of the level of competing demands
on student time and resources, prior experience with the material, or the course modality.

Join representatives from MCC and CircleIn to learn more about these and other findings from Phase I, including an examination of differences
in demographics and term GPA between students who used the app and those who did not. We will also share persistence outcomes using prediction-based
propensity score matching to provide a matched comparison for analysis.

And, based on promising results in Phase I, NSF has awarded CircleIn a Phase II grant that creates the opportunity for 25 additional colleges
to participate in the study. To find out more about CircleIn and participation in the Phase II project, join us for the webinar!