Community College Student Success Programs: A Synthesis, Critique, and Research Agenda

An Empirical Typology of the Latent Programmatic Structure of Community College Student Success Programs

“…The extent of overlap between latent and nominal program types illustrates one reason conceptual definitions for success courses, first-year seminars, and learning communities have traditionally been so challenging to pin down and why they so readily blend into orientation and developmental education programs (Bailey and Alfonso 2005;Barefoot 1992;Crisp and Taggart 2013;Smith 2010). Researchers have had to rely on ambiguous names and a narrow focus on the main organizing principles of programs to define and delimit their studies.…”

“…We utilized the inventory of programs proposed by CCCSE (2012) to organize our review and make sense of ambiguous program descriptions. CCCSE's list of practices has advantages over previous inventories (Bailey and Alfonso 2005;Crisp and Taggart 2013;Kulik et al 1983;Mills 2010;Swaner and Brownell 2009) in that it is more expansive and the practices are divided conceptually depending on whether they are for planning, initiating, or sustaining student success. In previous inventories, authors have typically grouped together practices based mostly on the preponderance of published research, but without conceptual inclusion or exclusion criteria.…”

“…These are designed to equip incoming students with skills, knowledge, and support networks for successful college-going (CCCSE 2012; Levin et al 2010;Price and Tovar 2014). There is growing evidence these practices have the potential to impact a number of desirable student outcomes (see reviews by Brownell and Swaner 2009;Crisp and Taggart 2013;Kulik et al 1983;Karp 2011;Swaner and Brownell 2009). However, most related research is conducted in the 4-year sector.…”

“…To date, evaluation researchers have mainly focused on the average effects of programs but have, for the most part, struggled to answer "why some programs are more effective than others and what it might take to design and operate more successful programs" (Weiss et al 2013, p. 2). Researchers studying student success programs in community colleges agree that the field needs substantially more details about program components, more rigorous research designs, and more multi-institutional studies in order to more clearly demonstrate whether and why interventions may contribute to differential student outcomes (Bailey and Alfonso 2005;Brownell and Swaner 2009;Crisp and Taggart 2013;Karp 2011). Along with a scarcity of methodologically sophisticated and large-scale studies, there is an absence of conceptual frameworks to operationalize program environments in the first place.…”

Content Validation of the Community College Student Success Program Inventory

“…The research literature largely shows these programs do make a difference (Crisp & Taggart, 2013), though it is not clear to what extent (Robbins, Oh, Le, & Button, 2009), why the impact may be short-lived or long-lasting (Karp, Raufman, Efthimiou, & Ritze, 2016;Weiss et al, 2015), or to what extent effects are due to student or program differences (Pike, Kuh, & McCormick, 2011;Porter & Swing, 2006). To address these limitations, researchers have called for larger-scale studies across multiple sites that better account for programmatic features.…”