Pilot study to Improve Student Success at the University of Kansas: A Randomized Evaluation of Technology and Peer Support

Navigate360 (called “Jayhawk GPS” at the University of Kansas) is a multifunctional tool available as an app and web platform that is used by universities across the country for student success and retention. Students can schedule appointments with various campus offices, receive important course alerts from faculty, request specific support from offices on campus, and view meeting notes from past appointments with advisors among other features.

In addition to offering a range of student services, Jayhawk GPS includes several retention-focused functions for university staff including quick polls, progress reports, population health assessments, predictive analytics, and success markers. Progress reports are one of the primary functions that University of Kansas uses as a part of its proactive retention efforts. Progress reporting offers an opportunity to identify students showing signs of academic distress early, allowing staff to review options and connect students with appropriate campus resources before they have earned a low or failing final grade.

How Progress Reporting Works
Jayhawk GPS administrators send instructors a progress report campaign weblink at specific points throughout the semester (e.g., week two and week seven). Instructors or course TAs are asked to submit feedback on student performance in their courses. The system then generates student alerts, which are delivered either automatically through the platform or through directly by the outreach team. Student navigators begin outreach with a phone call to learn more about the challenges affecting the student’s academic performance and connecting them to the appropriate campus resources. During the call, student navigators may also escalate the case to the student’s academic advisor and assist with scheduling the appointment. If the student is not reached by phone call, student navigators will follow up with a text message.

2026-09-01

2026-12-01

Grades in the course
DFW (withdrawal) rates
Retention to the next term

We will compare student academic outcomes (e.g., grades in that course, DFW (withdraw) rates by course, and retention at KU to next term) for students across each of the treatment arms, adjusting for instructors, courses, gender, race, home county, Pell status, and other available demographic controls.

Grades in other courses
Self-reported survey responses about the usefulness of the tool and the extent to which they felt supported in these classes.

We will compare grades in other courses and self-reported survey responses for students across each of the treatment arms, adjusting for instructors, courses, gender, race, home county, Pell status, and other available demographic controls.

This study will include general education courses at KU with high levels of enrollment, high DFW rates (mostly from KU’s general education https://kucore.ku.edu/), and three or more sections. Within each course, each section (i.e., cluster) will be randomly assigned to one of the following treatment arms:

- No Progress Reporting
- Jayhawk GPS Progress Reporting
- Jayhawk GPS Progress Reporting with navigator interventions

Sections assigned to no progress reporting will not use Jayhawk GPS. Sections assigned to progress reporting only will input relevant information about student progress into the Jayhawk system. Sections assigned to progress reporting with navigator-led outreach will input relevant information about student progress into the Jayhawk system, and will have student outreach coordinators supporting efforts to communicate with students flagged in these systems as being at risk for not passing.

Not available

Randomization done in office by a computer

Section within a course

Yes

We are inviting a range of courses with a collective 155 course sections to participate in this study.

There are approximately 4,500 students across the courses we are inviting to participate in the study.

If all invited courses choose to participate, we will have 51-52 clusters in our control group and each treatment arm.

We used PowerUP! (Dong and Maynard 2013) for a power analysis. In Spring 2025, the mean outcome grade in the courses we sampled that would be appropriate for this intervention was a 2.80 (C+) with a standard deviation of 1.26 and a harmonic mean of 12.3 students per section. Using 163 student-level covariates (fixed effects for each value of class, grade, gender, first generation status, honors program enrollment, major, and instructor name), our adjusted R2 is 0.19. If we randomize 96 sections evenly across our 3 control/treatment arms, this yields a minimum detectable effect size of 0.156 standard deviations, which is 0.20 GPA points. This is comparable to the effect found by Carrell and Kurlaender (2023) which randomized sending supportive emails to struggling students in introductory economics, and so we believe our proposed pilot is reasonable.