Framework for Student Success
Source: Kuh, G. D., Kinzie, J., Buckley, J. A., Bridges, B. K., Hayek, J. C. (2006). What matters to student success: A review of the literature. Washington, DC: NPEC.
Figure 1 is the guiding framework for our analysis. Instead of the familiar “pipeline” analogy
depicted by a direct route to educational attainment, a more accurate representation is a wide path with twists, turns, detours, roundabouts, and occasional dead ends that many students may encounter during their educational career. As we shall see, this figure is a more realistic portrayal of contemporary postsecondary education.
The first section of the path represents students’ precollege experiences. We summarize the effects of academic preparation in K–12 schools, family background, enrollment choices, and financial aid and assistance policies on various dimensions of student success. These and related factors and conditions affect the odds that students will do what is necessary to prepare for and succeed in college. In figure 1, mediating conditions are represented as transitions that students must successfully navigate to continue their education. They include remediation courses that do not count toward graduation but which are necessary to continued enrollment, and the need to work many hours off campus which can prohibit students from fully engaging in the college experience. If students are not able to successfully find their way through these screens, they may be either temporarily or permanently separated from the college experience.
The next part of the path—the college experience itself—includes two central features: students’
behaviors and institutional conditions. Student behaviors include such aspects as the time and effort students put into their studies, interaction with faculty, and peer involvement. Institutional conditions include resources, educational polices, programs and practices, and structural features.
At the intersection of student behaviors and institutional conditions is student engagement. We
focus on student engagement because it represents aspects of student behavior and institutional
performance that colleges and universities can do something about, at least on the margins, whereas many other factors such as precollege characteristics are typically beyond the direct control of the student or the college or university. Equally important, high levels of student engagement are associated with a wide range of educational practices and conditions, including purposeful student-faculty contact, active and collaborative learning, and institutional environments perceived by students as inclusive and affirming and where expectations for performance are clearly communicated and set at reasonably high levels (Astin 1991; Chickering and Gamson 1987; Chickering and Reisser 1993; Kuh et al.1991; Pascarella 2001; Pascarella and Terenzini 1991, 2005). These and other student behaviors and institutional conditions discussed in more detail later are related to student satisfaction, persistence, educational attainment and learning and development across a variety of dimensions (Astin 1984, 1985, 1993b; Bruffee 1993; Goodsell, Maher, and Tinto 1992; Johnson, Johnson, and Smith 1991; McKeachie et al., 1986; Pascarella and Terenzini; Pike 1993; Sorcinelli 1991).
Finally, we briefly summarize the literature on the desired outcomes and post-college indicators of student success. Among the many functions of postsecondary education in a knowledge-based economy is preparing students to live productive, satisfying, responsible and economically self-sufficient lives. Indeed, given the massive investments of public and private resources in building and sustaining postsecondary educational institutions, knowing how individual students and the larger society benefit is, perhaps, the most important barometers of the degree to which students succeed in college.