Compared to their younger peers, adult learners have lower retention rates and are more likely to be impacted by risk factors that can impede college success, including having a dependent, being a first-generation college student or working full time.

To better support adult learners, the University of Phoenix designed an introductory-level health and wellness course that addresses the hidden curriculum of higher education and the needs of adult online learners.

A recently published white paper found that incoming students who took the course were more likely to do well in the two classes that followed than their peers who didn’t. The data prompted an overhaul of the College of General Studies’ first-year course series for new students to improve student persistence and success rates.

Setting the scene: The University of Phoenix’s College of General Studies enrolls primarily nontraditional students; the average attendee is a 38-year-old parent who works full-time. Sixty percent of the undergraduate population is also first-generation, a group that historically has less support and social capital to navigate higher education.

The university offers rolling start dates for its online programs, so students don’t follow traditional terms or semesters as benchmarks for progress.

Undergraduates follow a six-course progression in their first year, taking Foundations for University Success and then the Psychology of Learning (PSY 110). Data showed that approximately 77 percent of new students with less than 12 credits passed the second course. (The report did not include first-class passing rates, because it wasn’t the focus of the intervention.)

Administrators wanted to see if adding a health and wellness course between the two would improve passing rates for subsequent courses. So they modified the schedule to have some students take Elements of Health and Wellness (SCI 163T) as the second course in the sequence and PSY 110 as their third course.

“We hypothesized that by moving an existing high-performing science course to the second course in undergraduate student schedules, we could significantly improve second course pass rates and maintain or slightly improve progression and pass rates for the two courses that followed,” according to the white paper.

Elements of Health and Wellness covers stress management, healthy eating and sufficient sleep, among other topics. It also includes an assignment that normalizes help-seeking behaviors and asking for accommodations from university support offices.

But because students were taking the course later in their academic career, after they might have already needed help, researchers theorized the intervention was less impactful on outcomes than if delivered earlier. 

The study: The white paper includes two test periods when researchers collected data from students, first in May 2023 as an A/B test and later in October 2023, when they made all students follow the modified sequence.

Among the 4,113 students who enrolled in SCI 163T during the first test, the average pass rate was 94 percent, and the course earned a 79 percent student satisfaction ranking. Ten percent of students who took SCI 163T second withdrew from the course and just under 1 percent failed the course, compared to 12 percent of students who withdrew when PSY 110 was their second course and 8 percent who failed.

Researchers learned that students who took SI 163T second had a higher pass rate in that class, compared to their peers in PSY 110, were more likely to continue into their third or fourth classes, and earned higher pass rates in subsequent courses.

In the second round of testing, researchers placed all students entering in October into SCI 163T for their second course and compared the results to students who took PSY 110 as their second course during the summer (August to October 2023). Similarly, students with less than 12 credits who enrolled in the science class had an 8-percentage-point lower withdraw or failure rate, compared to their peers with similar credit levels in the psychology course.

The results: College administrators shared the results of the study with the provost’s office, recommending that the course sequence be changed to move SCI 163T as the preferred second course for first-year students.

To create space in students’ course sequencing, the college opted to remove a 100-level finance course from the first-year plan, which was approved by the academic council in January 2024 and applied to new students’ academic plans as of April 1.

The university will continue to monitor student data to identify ways to improve student progression, as well as the impacts of hidden curriculum on students’ help-seeking behaviors and interventions to support them, such as AI-powered tools.