Jillian Kinzie

Unmasking the Effects of Student Engagement on First-Year College Grades and Persistence

This study examines the relationships between student engagement, college GPA, and persistence for 6,000 students attending 18 baccalaureate-granting institutions. Data sources included student-level information from the National Survey of Student Engagement, academic transcripts, merit aid, and ACT/SAT score reports. Engagement had positive, statistically significant effects on grades and persistence between the first and second year of study for students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Equally important, engagement had compensatory effects for historically underserved students in that they benefited more from participating in educationally purposeful activities in terms of earning higher grades and being more likely to persist.

A Tangled Web of Terms: The Overlap and Unique Contribution of Involvement, Engagement, and Integration to Understanding College Student Success

Established theories and constructs long associated with student success, including involvement, engagement, and integration, provide common language and a body of knowledge to inform understanding of the challenges currently facing higher education. This paper examines how the theories and terms have evolved, explores how the terms are currently used, and considers their legacy for understanding contemporary concerns about student development and success.

Examining the Ways Institutions Create Student Engagement: The Role of Mission

This article reviews the results from an in-depth multi-site case study of 20 institutions examining approaches to student engagement exploring differences by mission. The research questions pursued were: Is mission related to distinctive approaches for creating an engaging environment for students? If so, in what ways? The results demonstrate a set of relationships between institutional mission and the five benchmarks of effective educational practice identified by the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Implications for institutional policy are reviewed.

Science Achievement Growth Trajectories: Understanding Factors Related to Gender and Racial–Ethnic Differences in Precollege Science Achievement

Using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and longitudinal data from the first three waves of the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS:88), we examined achievement and growth rates in precollege science by racial–ethnic and gender subgroups. We found socioeconomic status and previous grades strongly and positively related to students’ eighth-grade achievement across all racial–ethnic by gender subgroups. We also found locus-of-control to be strongly related to eighth-grade science achievement for all subgroups except Asian American males. In modeling the growth rate, we found that the quantity of science units completed in high school was the only consistent predictor of science growth rates across all racial–ethnic by gender subgroups. The relationships between individual-level factors and science growth rates differed greatly for the remaining individual-level variables, highlighting the need for further research that both disaggregates data by race–ethnicity and gender.

Women Students at Coeducational and Women's Colleges: How Do Their Experiences Compare?

This study compared the experiences of women attending womens colleges with those of women attending coeducational institutions. Analyses of data from the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) from random samples of female first-year and senior students from 26 womens colleges and 264 other four-year institutions were conducted. Women at single-sex institutions were more engaged in effective educational practices and reported higher levels of feelings of support and greater gains in college. With regard to the effect of different backgrounds on college experiences, transfer students at womens colleges were as engaged or more engaged than students who start at and graduate from the same school, and students of color tended to be less engaged than White students.

Going DEEP: Learning from Campuses that Share Responsibility for Student Success.

Nearly two years of intensive research into the daily work of twenty institutions may finally put to rest any doubt that building cross-campus collaborations to facilitate student success is essential.

Student Engagement: Bridging Research and Practice to Improve the Quality of Undergraduate Education

This chapter traces the development of student engagement as a research-informed intervention to shift the discourse on quality in higher education to emphasize matters of teaching and learning while providing colleges and universities with diagnostic, actionable information that can inform improvement efforts. The conceptual lineage of student engagement blends a set of related theoretical propositions (quality of effort, involvement, and integration) with practice-focused prescriptions for good practice in undergraduate education. The development of survey-based approaches to measuring student engagement is reviewed, including a treatment of recent criticisms of these approaches. Next, we summarize important empirical findings, including validation research, typological research, and research on institutional improvement. Because student engagement emerged as an intervention to inform educational improvement, we also present examples of how engagement data are being used at colleges and universities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of challenges and opportunities going forward.

Fostering Student Success in Hard Times

The challenges facing colleges and universities today may be unprecedented in number and complexity. The recent deep recession continues to take its toll and college costs continue to rise, even wh...

DEEP Colleges and Universities as Communities

DEEP Colleges and Universities as Communities[information deleted for blind review]AbstractThe value of establishing a strong community in institutions of higher education has been in the forefront of the thinking of educators for a number of years. As colleges and universities have grown in complexity, establishing and sustaining strong campus communities has been described as challenging and difficult.John Gardner has provided a framework for thinking about and developing communities that is instructive for colleges and universities. Among the characteristics that he has conceptualized for good communities are the following: They incorporate and value diversity, they have a shared culture, they foster internal communication, they promote caring, trust and teamwork, they have group maintenance processes and governance structures that encourage participation and sharing of leadership tasks, they foster the development of young people, and they have links to the outside world. We also believe that strong communities incorporate rituals and ceremonies that celebrate their culture.Using Gardners framework, we have examined data from the Documenting Effective Education Practice research project (DEEP) to determine the extent to which the concept of community is incorporated and nurtured at the research sites. Our conclusion was that DEEP institutions are strong communities that incorporate the elements of community. This article provides examples for each of Gardners elements from DEEP institutions. It also provides questions for those institutions that wish to strengthen their sense of community.

Refocusing the Quality Discourse: The United States National Survey of Student Engagement

This chapter reports on work conducted with nearly 1,500 bachelors degree-granting colleges and universities in the USA to assess the extent to which their undergraduates are exposed to and participate in empirically proven effective educational activities. The chapter begins with a discussion of the prevailing quality discourse in the USA. It then explores the conceptual and empirical foundations of student engagement and the origins of NSSE as both a response to the quality problem and as a diagnostic tool to facilitate improvement. The chapter also discusses tensions between internal improvement and external accountability efforts, and NSSE’s role in the assessment and accountability movements. It concludes with a discussion of challenges that confront the project going forward.