I'm here to share with you the services that we're here to provide for all of our students.  And as faculty members I want you to know that we're here to work with you and that we often share with our students that faculty are the first line of communication; however, our academic support services are here to help the university with the retention effort, so we are here to support our students, as well as faculty, to help our students move forward through graduation.  

The Academic Support Services, again, the Academic Achievement Center, our motto is advancing students and enhancing learning.  And by doing that, what we do is we provide of variety of services free of charge for our students here on campus.  Our services are primarily for our undergraduate students; however, there are some services that some of the students may find to be pretty appropriate based on their academic needs.  What we currently have are services to include walk-in tutoring, tutoring that is primarily group tutoring.  We have appointment-based tutoring, and then also we have study group facilitation.  In addition, we provide a variety of study skills workshops; we have academic coaching; we also have placement testing as part of our services.  And then we also work along with the developmental math area to provide some assistance for students who want to work on self-paced online math assistance that is located right in our area.  

We are both centralized and decentralized in the services that we provide.  I mentioned academic coaching, which is basically borrowed from athletic terminology, where we work with our students to assist them in developing studying strategies that capitalize on their strengths.  We provide informal assessment, such as Gallup Strength Inventory, as well as we provide a variety of learning styles inventories to give the students information about who they are as learners, and to teach them to be independent learners and work through some of the challenges that they may have from semester to semester or maybe just in one particular course.  We have a master's level staff learning specialists who will coach the students to success by working with them and to developing a study schedule, as well as learning how they can best study different materials, whether it be objective tests or essay tests, so these students will come to us seeking the support, and our professional staff with give them a variety of support strategies and techniques so that they can be successful learners.  

We have a certified peer-tutoring program, and what means is that we are internationally certified through an organization called College Reading and Learning Association where we train our tutors to work with our students, and the tutors have As or B pluses in their courses, but, as well as, they're learning the strategies to be effective conveyers of the information to work as a partner with the faculty members when students are having some level of difficulty.  I also mentioned placement testing, as well as facilitating study groups for students who are maybe taking upper level courses, but they need that additional support, particularly when it's time to study for comprehensive exams and they want to work with their peers in working through a lot of different problems that they may have, or they may develop their own problem-solving skills working together, supporting one another effectively.  

Our main location is located in Cook Library on the fifth floor, but we also have four satellite laboratories, and that includes our computer science lab, our mathematics lab, our natural sciences lab, as well as our music lab, and each of these labs is located in the classroom building where most of the courses are taught.  I encourage you, again, to look at our website and that will give you the exact location, as well as the times, that each of these services are available for your students.  

In addition, there are other support programs that are available for all of our students, and the one specifically that I like to mention is through our English area.  The English Department offers a variety of writing support to include the Writing Support Program, and the Writing Support Program works with students who have some difficulty with their fundamental grammar skills.  And it's an online, self-paced module, and, in addition, in-person feedback is added.  The program is called, Online Writing Site, known as "OWS."

If you look on the website you will get more detailed information about that program.  In addition, we have two services that work with all stages of our writing development, from the idea through completion of the final draft.  We have one service that is for native speakers called the Writing Lab, and then we have the Writing Support Program for ESOL.  Each of those you can find the exact locations by going on the website to get that.  

For additional information, I encourage you to go to www.towson.edu/aac, and it will give you a very detailed video that includes our students who are peer tutors, and they are giving suggestions as to how you can best utilize our tutorial services and our other support services that I've mentioned, such as the study skills workshops that gives students hands-on information and strategies on goal setting, learning styles, time management.  If you check our website each semester it will list the times and the dates for each of those study sessions and workshops.  

Again, I'd like to thank you for your time, and I look forward to working with you and your students.  Remember that our services are free of charge; however, you can also send us your students who are earning those As and B pluses to work as tutors and student staff in our office.  So we look forward to serving you, but also working as partners in retaining our students through graduation.  Have a great semester.