Pullias Researchers Investigate Relationship Between Psychosocial and Academic Outcomes in Higher Education

States are increasingly tying postsecondary funding to easily quantifiable outcomes such as retention and graduation rates even as employers emphasize the importance of psychosocial skills. New research looks into whether psychosocial and academic outcomes move together in  postsecondary organizations or whether they are competing goals.

“Postsecondary institutions are being pulled in multiple, potentially competing, directions regarding the skills, knowledge, and experiences they should create for students,” notes Elise Swanson, one of the Pullias Center researchers on the project. “We are therefore exploring whether there is a relationship between students’ psychosocial and academic outcomes in their first three years of college, in order to inform postsecondary institutions working to promote student success in both psychosocial and academic domains.”

The team is relating four psychosocial outcomes (mattering to campus, belonging to campus, academic self-efficacy, and social self-efficacy) to students’ academic outcomes (cumulative GPA and persistence). The study is part of the Promoting At-Promise Student Success (PASS) project, a mixed methods study that has been ongoing for the last five years at the Pullias Center with generous funding from the Susan T. Buffett Foundation.

“The team is looking to understand what is the relationship between students’ reported psychosocial skills and cumulative GPA at the end of their first, second, and third years on campus and whether those relationships vary by student race/ethnicity, sex, prior academic achievement, first-generation status, or socioeconomic status,” states Tatiana Melguizo, Associate Professor at USC and study co-author. “We are also exploring the connection between students’ reported psychosocial skills and likelihood of continued enrollment throughout their first six semesters, or three years, on campus.”

While still in the analysis and preliminary reporting stage, the researchers are finding significant, but small-to-moderate, positive correlations between students’ sense of belonging to campus, mattering to campus, academic self-efficacy, and cumulative GPA throughout students’ first three years. “These correlations provide suggestive evidence that these four psychosocial outcomes are indeed related to students’ postsecondary academic achievement,” highlights Paco Martorell, Associate Professor at UC-Davis and study co-author, “Although these relationships may not be as strong as prior theory would suggest, we do see consistent relationships between academic self-efficacy and sense of belonging with academic outcomes.” Across students’ first six semesters, higher levels of belonging and academic self-efficacy are associated with an approximately 27% reduction in likelihood of dropout.The Pullias Center is also interested in exploring the relative predictive power of changes in psychosocial outcomes and cumulative GPA. Initial analyses indicate changes in cumulative GPA are consistently predictive of persistence decisions, and the relationship between changes in academic performance and persistence is stronger than the relationship between changes in psychosocial outcomes and persistence.

The researchers have noted seeing that changes in psychosocial outcomes do have some predictive power. Specifically, changes in students’ belonging to campus and social self-efficacy during their first year are significantly related to the likelihood that students will persist into their second year, so that students whose affiliation to the institution and confidence in social settings are more likely to remain enrolled.

“These analyses may help institutions refine early warning systems that typically only focus on academic indicators,” concludes Swanson. “Our work provides institutions of higher education additional evidence on the relationship between psychosocial skills, which are valued by employers and are related to richer on-campus experiences, and traditional academic outcomes, which are increasingly prioritized by states subsidizing the cost of college. “

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