Pullias Center Researchers Examine Student Engagement Through the Lens of Comprehensive College Transition Programs
Comprehensive college transition programs (CCTP), which provide academic and social support for at-promise students as they transition to college and begin their academic journey, are gaining traction as a systematic approach to supporting the students’ learning, development, and college success. For the last 5 years, a team of researchers at the Pullias Center have been looking to gain a crucial understanding of how and why these programs are effective.
While CCTPs are becoming more common in higher education, there have been relatively few studies that examine their success. What little has been written tends to focus on the relationship of these programs with traditional outcomes like persistence or GPA. The Promoting At-Promise Student Success Project (PASS) project, a mixed methods study underway at the Pullias Center with generous funding from the Susan T. Buffett Foundation, is taking a different direction. The study is an examination of a CCTP for low-income students that explores the mechanisms that may cultivate these relationships between CCTPs and student outcomes. As part of the study, the research team is looking at how the program fosters engagement among the low-income students from diverse backgrounds who participate in the CCTP.
“CCTPs are important spaces for students from underrepresented groups, especially as they transition to college,” notes KC Culver, one of the Pullias Center researchers on the project who also presented about engagement with CCTPs at the 2020 Annual Conference on The First-Year Experience and the 2020 Hawaii International Conference on Education. “It is important to examine the intricacies of fostering engagement among the diverse students these programs are designed to support.”
As part of the study, the team is researching a large, multi-campus, two-year comprehensive college transition program (CCTP) designed for low-income students from diverse backgrounds. They are reexamining engagement based on students’ race and/or ethnicity, sex, first-generation status, income levels, and academic preparation for college, in order to investigate how students’ experiences may explain their engagement.
So far they have found similar levels of engagement across those factors. “It’s quite unusual to have a program that promotes students’ engagement across diverse groups,” notes Ronald E. Hallett, another Pullias Center researcher on the project. “There is a body of literature suggesting low income and first-generation students engage less often. However, the tailored support specifically provided by TSLC and validation, which is something we have particularly been interested in, may be promoting similar engagement levels.”
Another extension of the PASS project is examining engagement by looking at shared academic courses (SACs) between students in the same CCTP cohort. Researchers are exploring the relationship between students’ engagement in SACs and a range of factors including development of sense of belonging and mattering to campus, social self-efficacy, academic self-efficacy, and academic achievement during their first year
They are finding that students reported their SAC experiences positively, especially in comparison to the other courses in which they are enrolled. They also discovered no differences in students’ level of engagement in SACs based on students’ race/ethnicity, first-generation status, or prior academic achievement, suggesting any benefits of these types of classes are available to all students.
Researchers also noted that greater engagement in SACs predict higher psychosocial outcomes at the end of students’ first year. Furthermore, they found that student engagement in SACs during their second year significantly predicts higher third-year outcomes, which is when students are no longer enrolled in the formal CCTP program.
“Although we cannot isolate the precise mechanism, these results suggest that shared academic courses may be an important bridge between high school and upper-level university coursework,” notes Culver. The PASS team continues to analyze the data and expect to publish the findings and recommendation from the research in the near future. “It’s clear that what we are learning in these studies can help guide models or pilot programs for larger scale change at the institutional level,” she concludes.
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