The definition and description of student success programs in the literature (e.g., orientation, firstyear seminars, learning communities, etc.) suggest underlying programmatic similarities. Yet researchers to date typically depend on ambiguous labels to delimit studies, resulting in loosely related but separate research lines and few generalizable findings. To demonstrate whether or how certain programs are effective there is need for more coherent conceptualizations to identify and describe programs. This is particularly problematic for community colleges where success programs are uniquely tailored relative to other sectors. The study's purpose is to derive an empirical typology of community college student success programs based on their curricular and programmatic features. Data come from 1047 success programs at 336 U.S.-based respondents to the Community College Institutional Survey. Because programs might be characterized by their focus in different curricular areas and combinations of foci, we used factor mixture modeling, a hybrid of factor analysis and latent class analysis, which provides a model-based classification method that simultaneously accounts for dimensional and categorical data structures. Descriptive findings revealed extensive commonalities among nominal program types. Inferential analysis revealed five factors (types) of program elements, combined in unique ways among four latent program types: success skills programs, comprehensive programs, collaborative academic programs, and minimalist programs. We illustrate how the typology deconstructs nominal categories, may help unify different bodies of research, and affords a common framework and language for researchers and practitioners to identify and conceptualize programs based on what they do rather than by their names.
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Community colleges increasingly implement various student success programs, including 1st-year seminars, college skills courses, learning communities, and orientation, in an effort to boost degree completion. However, it is unclear how success programs’ curricular designs may contribute to these and associated student outcomes. Such inquiry is limited, in part, by the lack of methodological frameworks for program impact heterogeneity research. This study proposes a new conceptualization of nominally different student success programs as instances of a broader activity, which also provides a way to operationalize their curricular structures in comparable ways. Second, to briefly illustrate this approach, the study leverages matched program and student data to investigate how variations in student engagement—an emergent intermediate outcome for fostering successful college going—are related to variation in program design. Findings reveal that structural and underutilized curricular elements may be more impactful than skills-based curricula that are typically the organizing focus of these programs.
This study employs survey data from the Center for Community College Student Engagement to examine the similarities and differences that exist across student-level domains in terms of student engagement in community colleges. In total, the sample used in the analysis pools data from 663 community colleges and includes more than 320,000 students. Using data-mining techniques to discover a parsimonious number of natural clusters and, in turn, a k-means cluster analysis as a means of revealing a naturally occurring typology of engagement patterns, our findings reveal that support service utilization is the most distinguishing feature of the similarities and dissimilarities across student groups, suggesting areas for further theory development and testing.
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