Censio Analytics Creates Unique Assessments to Evaluate, Increase Student Retention
A game-based assessment designed to address the inequality in college retention and completion among underserved students and help them realize their full potential is the creation of Omaha company Censio Analytics.
- published: 2023/02/14
- contact: NBDC Communications - Nebraska Business Development Center
- phone: 402.554.6256
- email: kjefferson@unomaha.edu
Omaha, Nebraska – A game-based assessment designed to address the inequality in college retention and completion among underserved students and help them realize their full potential is the creation of Omaha company Censio Analytics.
Sangeeta Badal, a former faculty member at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio who most recently worked more than 20 years in various analytics roles at Gallup, Inc., founded Censio Analytics in late 2020.
Badal says that a growing gap exists between students from high-income and low-income families in terms of their entry to college, retention, and graduation. She says this impedes upward social and economic mobility, and costs society billions in underutilized human potential.
“Colleges and universities, especially those catering to traditionally underserved students, are looking to counter high disengagement and dropout rates with unique and scalable solutions,” she says. “This had led Censio Analytics to create a technology that will measure the psychological underpinnings of student attrition via game-based assessments and predict dropout risk in real time using Bayesian Networks,” a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph.
“The behavioral insights gathered from the games will be utilized to develop individualized learning and social support services, scaffolding students with just-in-time support to stem attrition,” she says.
Badal says the idea began as an extension of her skill set. “By leveraging insights from entrepreneurship, behavioral economics, analytics, and psychology, we identified five meta-cognitive attributes: resilience, proactive disposition, achievement orientation, divergent thinking, and fluid intelligence, that predict student retention,” she says.
The result of working more than 1-1/2 years with a game development company, Censio’s game-based assessment is based on behavioral science and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to improve prediction of student retention and success. “We wanted to evaluate not only cognitive skills, but expand to the meta- or non-cognitive skills,” she says, those “soft skills” related to resilience, overcoming obstacles, and thinking creatively that are associated with an individual's likelihood to succeed in college.
After hearing Badal’s ideas, a professor at UNO told her about the Nebraska Business Development Center (NBDC) and in November 2020 offered an email introduction to NBDC’s Director of Innovation and Technology Program, Josh Nichol-Caddy.
Nichol-Caddy and his team have since worked with Badal to develop, format, and submit several Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant applications. She is also working with one of NBDC’s many partner organizations, BBC Entrepreneurial Training & Consulting (BBCetc), which provides SBIR proposal writing services and has a special focus on women founders. Badal’s latest SBIR applications seek National Science Foundation (NSF) and U.S. Department of Education funding.
Badal says Censio Analytics currently has five games in development. Data is being collected to validate the games and service its first customer.
She says Censio aims to create value for its customers by reducing tuition loss and increasing ranking/status of the universities. “In addition, by helping students complete their degrees, the Censio technology intends to yield increased social mobility and lifetime earnings, and higher levels of self-esteem and self-efficacy,” she says. “Retaining students could also have benefits at the societal level, such as closing the equity gap, providing a better educated workforce and higher gross domestic product."
“Our larger vision is to create an engaging student portal where college officials can track students through their college journey and personalize support for at-risk students,” she says.
She says the data produced through the Censio technology could reduce the achievement gap and economic loss rooted in underutilized potential. “We can play a role in helping the most vulnerable students,” she says, “and ultimately enable them to be more successful in school and life.”