Real-Time Student Feedback That Is Transforming College and Career Guidance

WestEd’s Center for Economic Mobility puts students at the center of research on college and career counseling. We talk directly with students about their challenges, then help educators improve their support programs.

The Challenge

Young people today face more changes and uncertainty than ever before, and many feel unprepared for what comes after high school. Common challenges include the following:

not getting enough help with financial planning

limited career counseling

uneven access to supportive resources

With tight budgets, educators need to redesign how they help students rather than rely on small fixes. Regular surveys or occasional focus groups give some useful information, but they don’t provide the deep insights needed to overhaul student support services in a way that is student-centered. By engaging students in ongoing, structured dialogue, educators could better understand their students’ evolving needs and challenges, so that their voices drive wholesale improvement rather than piecemeal actions.

How We’re Taking Action

The Center uses an innovative method created by Dr. Yvonne Olivares that involves multiple rounds of research designed to adapt and change over time. The Multimodal Cognitive Method is flexible and works with different types of content and student groups.

Instead of research that captures only a snapshot in time, the approach engages students in online focus groups that happen multiple times over several days. Students can participate according to their own schedules using tools like short videos, voice recordings, and chat messages, and researchers can quickly follow up with additional questions. Each study generates thousands of minutes of data, providing ongoing and actionable insights about obstacles, how well systems are working, and new opportunities for students during important transitions.

This continuous feedback method lets our team include students who typically don’t participate in traditional research. By hearing from a wider range of students, we’ve discovered an urgent need for comprehensive, student-focused college and career guidance systems that:

start in middle school,

include financial planning,

adapt as students’ clarify their goals, and

provides more integration and regular check-ins than the programs most schools currently offer.

I recommend creating a feedback platform, where high school seniors can express their needs anonymously and make it compulsory for school policy makers to go through our feedback on regular occasions.

California high school senior

What Makes Us Different

Iterative engagement – Unlike traditional focus groups that capture perspectives at a single point in time, we communicate with students over a weeklong period, which enables us to refine our understanding of their experience, test emerging insights, and ensure our solutions evolve.

Adaptive methodology – We use techniques like cognitive interviewing and flexible, online focus groups in real -time, continuously refining our methodology based on what is working and what isn’t, ultimately uncovering more authentic student experiences that can inform meaningful change.

Continuous validation – We create feedback loops that allow student-driven strategies to be tested, refined, and improved as solutions are implemented.