Student momentum

Sustaining momentum toward success

Our student momentum initiatives focus on empowering students with comprehensive support and resources to succeed at NAU. Various efforts, including work across our academic units and all of academic affairs, ensure students maintain their momentum towards academic success.

Empowering students and removing barriers

NAU emphasizes academic momentum by building a comprehensive support system designed to foster student success.  We work with students to provide sustained engagement throughout their academic journey and remove barriers to their progression, leading to their persistence and a successful completion of their educational goals.  

This multi-faceted initiative has many dimensions and consists of parallel and aligned efforts, including an emphasis on:

• High-quality academic advising and student support: Academic advisors, student development coordinators, and success coaches at NAU help support students with navigating the institution, accessing resources, responding to challenges they encounter, planning their academic journey and course selection, and ensuring they stay on track for completing their degree.
• Inclusive excellence in teaching: Our academic units and faculty are committed to advancing a culture of excellent teaching and shared responsibility for student momentum by adopting evidence-based practices that keep students on the path to success and position them to thrive after their graduation.
• Reducing curricular complexity: By engaging in a deliberative review of our curricula and programs of study, faculty and academic leaders are making changes that remove barriers to student academic momentum by simplifying and optimizing curricular pathways.
• Academic policy review: Our academic and institutional communities are coming together to review potential impediments to student momentum entrenched in our various policies and business processes, removing barriers to progression and allowing students additional flexibility to respond and recover from life events that challenge their academic journeys.
• Academic support: Our academic success and peer coaching programs offer students academic support and tutoring and help them develop the effective study habits, time management skills, and strategies for overcoming academic challenges that help them succeed.

At the core of this initiative is our commitment to ensuring student success. By creating a supportive environment that prioritizes student needs and academic goals, NAU ensures that each student has the tools and resources necessary to navigate their educational journey successfully. Through continuous engagement, removing barriers, personalized attention and advising, and targeted academic support, we strive to help students overcome challenges, stay motivated, and achieve their full potential.

Contact

For more information on this initiative, please contact Dr. John Georgas, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Operations.