Welcome
I am Dr. Tracy Skipper, and I am committed to advancing the conversation around college student success and helping scholars and practitioners find their place in that conversation.
I have more than 20 years of experience in academic publishing, specializing in acquisitions and content development of research and practice literature in higher education. As assistant director for publications for the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition at the University of South Carolina, I managed a small academic press, publishing research monographs, scholarly practice books, a peer-reviewed journal, practitioner-focused online newsletters, and a successful series of guides for families of new college students. As a press, we published a wide range of topics related to postsecondary transitions and college student learning, development, and success.
Through this work, I have supported and facilitated the scholarly conversation on college student success and have been a contributor to the conversation in my own right. I wrote Student Development in the First College Year: A Primer for College Educators (2005), envisioned and served as managing editor of the five-volume series, The First-Year Seminar: Designing, Implementing, and Assessing Courses to Support Student Learning and Success (2011-2012), and co-authored the volume Writing in the Senior Capstone: Theory and Practice (2013) with Lea Masiello.
My scholarly interests include the application of cognitive-structural development to composition pedagogy and the use of writing in first-year seminars and senior capstone courses. Recognizing the need to move beyond simply describing and categorizing high-impact practices (HIPs) to identifying the characteristics that make them educationally effective, I analyzed the structural supports for Kuh and O’Donnell’s (2013) HIP traits across a range of seminar types using data from the 2012-2013 National Survey of First-Year Seminars. The resulting case study collection—What Makes the First-Year Seminar High Impact? Exploring Effective Educational Practices (2017)—seeks to understand how first-year seminars function as effective educational experiences at the campus level.
More recently, I have been interested in institutional attention to creating coherence or alignment in the undergraduate experience—that is, how do institutions intentionally design vertically aligned learning experiences that allow students to make steady progress toward personal and institutional goals? To that end, I collected and edited a series of institutional case studies to explore how key initiatives in the sophomore year built on first-year initiatives while laying the groundwork for continued engagement and success throughout the rest of the undergraduate experience. This work, Aligning Institutional Support for Student Success: Case Studies of Sophomore-Year Initiatives (2019), was featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Selected New Books on Higher Education in January 2020.
I have served as a student affairs administrator, taught writing at the college level, and presented writing workshops for higher education professionals. I have developed and taught workshops and online courses on the application of student development theory to curricular and co-curricular contexts and frequently presented on what national datasets suggest about the organization and administration of high-impact educational practices. I have also designed faculty development workshops on the successful implementation of senior capstone experiences.
I hold degrees in psychology, higher education, American literature, and rhetoric and composition.