# Awareness to Action: Student Knowledge of and Responses to an Early Alert System
## 4 Discussion
### Design and Implementation Implications  
These findings have design, implementation, and policy implications for early alert systems in higher education. Direct recommendations from students include making the experience of receiving an early alert less focused on negative feedback and more constructive in providing actionable steps. Theoretical models of student persistence [13] and extant research [19,40] has demonstrated that taking action with positive outcomes and feedback can improve students' self-efficacy, and thereby their overall persistence in college. Therefore, universities should design and implement early alert systems that promote instructors giving positive feedback. Although follow-up email communications provide information to students to help them with next steps, such as information on how they can contact their academic advisor, recommendations from students regarding system improvement included better supporting them in responding to the ASR (e.g., providing course-specific options for next steps) and pairing an ASR with one-on-one communication with the instructor. Doing so may improve the rates of students reaching out to instructors or student success staff after receiving an ASR. Within the context of self-determination theory (SDT) ASRs currently may improve student persistence by improving relatedness. However, future design features aimed at improving other aspects of students' motivation within an SDT (i.e., autonomy, competence) may further improve persistence [10,52]. SDT is commonly used to inform the design and study of learning activities and technologies in higher education [53], including early alert systems [34]. Within early alert systems, features could be built to support each of these psychological needs and improve motivation to act. For example, students' perceived autonomy can be improved by offering them choice from a set of possible actions [54], students' perceived competence can be increased by pairing an early alert with personalized feedback that does not compare them to other students [55] (and aligns with recommendations for useful early alerts) [9], and students' perceived relatedness can be even further supported by offering avenues to form personal connections, such as to academic advisors [56]. Universities may also use informational interventions to bolster instructors' effective use of the early alert system and improve students' understanding of early alert systems. For example, an institution may offer training to instructors about how to use system features to provide actionable feedback to students. Additionally, previous work regarding student use of on-campus support services indicates that lack of knowledge is a barrier to accessing services [57] and direct instruction on resources can increase their use [58]. Thus, disseminating information to build students' knowledge of the system may increase their responsiveness to early alerts. Another consideration relates to best ways to connect students to support. In our sample, students reported that it was relatively uncommon that they communicated with an academic advisor after receiving an ASR, even though creating a \"triangle\" connection between students, staff, and instructors is a unique affordance of this system. While on the surface the low rate of advising communication seems like an area of improvement, it is also possible that these numbers reflect targeted reach-outs by staff (i.e., only when students meet certain criteria). Use of human-driven early alert systems is constrained by the number of human hours available for interaction with the system and academic support staff do not always have the resources to reach out to every single student who receives an alert [59]. Institutions can therefore aid student success staff by bringing together institutional data to inform decisions on which students are most in need of contact.