The Structure of Student Engagement in Community College Student Success Programs: A Quantitative Activity Systems Analysis

Abstract

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.

Content Validation of the Community College Student Success Program Inventory

“…These ratings do reveal the rarity of such features (Hatch & Bohlig, 2016). However, emerging evidence shows that they actually may have much more influence on engagement and meta-cognitive learning than skills-focused curricular items (Hatch, 2017;Hatch, Garcia, Mardock-Uman, Rodriguez, & Young, 2017). Table 8 relates to the instructor role in the course, which are key decision points in practice (Song, Price, & Dodrill, 2016) but rarely raised in research.…”

(Re)Measuring Community College Student Engagement: Testing a Seven-Factor CCSSE Model

“…While such framing broadly articulates that “engagement is about two elements: what the student does and what the institution does” (Wolf-Wendel et al, 2009, p. 413), this dynamic exchange is not always reflected in theoretical or empirical efforts approaching community college student engagement. Such a critique has been carefully presented by Hatch (2017) who has expanded on this interaction to consider community college student engagement, in both terminology and practice, as sociocultural in nature. As Hatch (2017) writes,Engagement is not something a student does or experiences but rather .…”

“…Such a critique has been carefully presented by Hatch (2017) who has expanded on this interaction to consider community college student engagement, in both terminology and practice, as sociocultural in nature. As Hatch (2017) writes,Engagement is not something a student does or experiences but rather . .…”

“…As Pike (2013) notes in his discussion of measuring engagement via the NSSE, benchmarks were designed to “represent clusters of good educational practices and to provide a starting point for examining specific aspects of student engagement” rather than “represent underlying psychological constructs” (p. 163). While we understand, as Hatch (2017) observes in citing these efforts, that such “benchmarks were designed not as psychometric scales but as a heuristic measure for engendering conversations about related practices by practitioners” (p. 7), the survey items were designed to capture student behaviors and perceptions. As McCormick et al (2013) write, “Because beliefs and attitudes are antecedents to behavior, perceptions of the campus environment are a critical piece in assessing a student’s receptivity to learning” (p. 57).…”

“…From a more traditional or student-centric view, benchmarks logically follow as they provide community college stakeholders with a snapshot of student involvement during a given academic year relative to other institutions. Taken from a contextualized sociocultural vantage such as that considered by Hatch (2017) and Tillapaugh (2019), however, measuring engagement demands consideration of theoretically derived psychometric properties beyond heuristic benchmarks. Put simply: measures of engagement which explicitly link theory to items and items to constructs may ultimately be more accurate indicators of engagement than heuristic benchmarks.…”