Case Study Summary
At Huntington University, Isaac Barber and his team successfully introduced TruMotivate to revamp the New Student Orientation experience. This initiative, marked by its emphasis on understanding and leveraging students’ inherent motivations, led to widespread faculty and staff buy-in, transforming the first-year programming and significantly enhancing student engagement.
Transforming the New Student Orientation Experience
Isaac Barber and his team in the Student Engagement office at Huntington University were scouring listservs for ideas on new assessments that would leave monumental and impactful change on their first- year programs when they came across TruMotivate – a story-based motivational assessment.
Before Issac, the New Student Orientation experience at Huntington was heavily reliant on legacy assessments like StrengthsFinder’s or Myers-Briggs. Isaac liked these tools, just not enough to keep up with the competitive pricing. As his team explored the listservs, they were clear that they were looking for something as insightful and in-depth as the legacy assessments. Time and time again, they were pointed to TruMotivate so his team decided to experience it for themselves. The results resonated deeply with Isaac and he began to envision what place the assessment would have in first-year programming. But what was the hurdle he knew he had to jump next? His faculty.
After five-plus years of utilizing these legacy assessments, there were still faculty at Huntington who remained unsure about their impact and usefulness in the first-year programming. Isaac’s nervousness was valid – he knew that programs and initiatives took time on his campus because the faculty often asked a lot of questions and preferred their established ways. But Isaac was confident in his experience with TruMotivate, and decided to run with the newcomer of legacy assessments.
Rooted in Positive Psychology
Off the bat, Isaac noticed what was different between TruMotivate and other assessments – the positive psychology. The assessment itself is rooted in the concept that every person inherently has value and brings it to the table. One such example of this was a story from a student leader in orientation who had two girls who would only turn in half of their assignments. After sitting down and talking about their motivations, both girls found that they were more motivated to be dreamers and idea-creators, rather than executors and finishers. This opened doors for the student leader to help transform how both girls perceived college and a balance of their motivations. The relationship between the student leader and the first-year students became a transformative one, engaging with their motivations, rather than a transnational one, where they were compliantly handling minimal requirements.
Ongoing Applications
While Isaac’s team found the assessment itself to be valuable, his real secret weapon to getting the faculty on board was the application of motivations. Faculty voiced that a common detractor of the legacy assessments was their one-time application. Isaac noted that often students would take StrengthsFinders, talk about it during orientation, and then never talk about it again. There was minimal – if any – application to their newfound self-awareness beyond the first week of school.
“The way we framed TruMotivate up, we got a lot of really good wins because even if students do think deeply, they often don’t want to talk about it. And so here they thought deeply, and they talked about it, and it was something that was really cool.”
— Isaac Barber, Associate Dean of Student Success
Using the Optimize Your College Experience Guidebook, Isaac and his team set to work scouring through the content with a fine-toothed comb until they had compiled a selection of activities that empowered students to deepen their understanding of self. They knew the weight of “getting it right the first time” in this programming would have on buy-in from the other faculty.
Motivational Mind Map
Using the motivational mind map in the career and academic exploration chapter was the real pot of gold in getting buy-in from faculty. Isaac’s team had decided to use the motivational mind-map, an activity where students use their motivational language to describe themselves. The map can then be used to explore careers or majors in alignment with how the student expresses their motivations. While the maps were being created in a larger-group setting, Isaac’s team had the guidebook available for faculty and staff to skim through and get ideas for their classroom sessions. Many faculty took the mind map activity and tailored it to fit their course. This collaboration of activities and application brought Huntington’s faculty one step closer to embracing TruMotivate for themselves.
Next Steps for TruMotivate at Huntington University
Ultimately, it was the assessment itself and its actionable insights that created the perfect storm for Isaac and his team to launch TruMotivate successfully alongside their faculty and staff. In Fall 2023, Huntington University introduced an assessment to nearly 300 first-year programming students. This assessment encouraged students to reflect on their college experience and transformed the way they thought and talked about themselves.
So, what’s next for Isaac and his team when it comes to TruMotivate? They’d love to bring it to their residence programming for first-year students. Referencing chapter 5 of the Guidebook, Resolving Conflict, Isaac noted that they don’t currently involve Residence Life in orientation programming, but he’d like to see that change. With 93% of fall room changes being first-year students, he sees the value in partnering with that department to engage students in communication and conflict resolution skills as it relates to motivations.
As Isaac reflects on the success of the Fall 2023 orientation class, he is assuredly 100% fully invested in TruMotivate, and finds that the faculty and staff are too. No longer are the faculty expected to push assessment results that will never be touched again or to walk blindly through the application of those results to the first-year experience. Instead, they can now bring a transformative impact to their interactions with students. And where orientation was previously optional for students, it’s now a class credit. Over 85% of students in their first-year program completed the TruMotivate assessment, with plans to continue over the next four years. So, in the words of Isaac, “if we have that over a sample size of four years, then we’re doing good things. And so, 100% I’ll champion it.”
