Journal of College Student Retention: Research,Theory & Practice

Learning communities, designed primarily to increase student persistence and academic achievement, are a common first-year initiative on university campuses. Assessments of learning communities frequently examine indicators that are easily quantifiable such as student persistence and academic achievement, but also examine factors thought to affect these outcomes such as student involvement and satisfaction. This article reviews published studies to determine the degree to which learning communities successfully affect involvement, satisfaction, achievement, and persistence, and attempts to identify the characteristics that produce positive results. The review concludes that first, learning communities do attain positive outcomes, but second, that it is difficult to determine which characteristics of learning communities (i.e., integrated course content, coordinated assignments, academic skills training, mentoring) account for their success due to the small number of studies, the heterogeneity of programs, and self-selection effects.

In this study, Nancy Schlossberg's (1989) theory of college students' mattering to others was revisited. Mattering is the experience of others depending on us, being interested in us, and being concerned with our fate. The relationships of gender, mattering to college friends and the college environment, and friend and family social support with academic stress of 533 first-year undergraduates were examined. Female students reported higher levels of family support, mattering to friends, mattering to their college, and academic stress. Regardless of gender, college friend social support was the most powerful predictor of mattering; mattering to the college was the most powerful predictor of academic stress levels. Research-informed implications for reducing first-year students' academic stress and enforcing their social support and experiences of mattering are discussed.

Research indicates that programs designed to target first year students increase their likelihood of success during that year and their chances of completing an undergraduate education (Bureau & Rromrey, 1994; Conner & Colton, 1999). Theoretically, such programs should help in part because they foster integration into campus communities and help align personal goals with institutional goals. In an effort to increase retention and achievement of first year students, the University of South Alabama implemented a program for resident first year students called ESSENCE in the fall of 1998. The purpose of this study is to measure the effects of that program on student success. Specifically we are interested in assessing the effects of the program on GPAs and graduation rates. In multivariate analyses, we compare GPAs and graduation rates for resident ESSENCE students, resident non-ESSENCE students, and non-resident students controlling for other predictors of success. We find that ESSENCE improves GPAs and the likelihood of graduating in five years relative to other experiences, even when controlling for other factors.

To promote the academic success of and to retain adult students of color, the Academic Services Unit at the University of Detroit Mercy (UDM), an urban Catholic university, in Detroit Michigan, has designed and implemented the Professional Mentor Program Plus, funded by the State of Michigan's King-Chavez-Parks (KCP) higher education initiative, that fuses academic support programming, and mentoring, designed exclusively for adult students, into a proactive academic success and retention model. The program's rationale, history, and findings from the 2003–04 year-end evaluation are presented, followed by the program's future development plan.

We identify “tenacious persisters” as returning students who have stopped out of college or who delayed their entry into college for more than three years after high school. Using a mixed method approach, we compare the experiences of tenacious persisters enrolled in a community college to students who followed more standard persistence paths. Both groups have similar motivations for attending college at this point in their lives, and similar expectations for achieving their goals. Tenacious persisters, however, attribute much more significance to barriers and personal deficiencies in explaining their past attendance patterns. We conclude that how students persist either as tenacious persisters or standard persisters seems to make a difference in how they view their current attempt at college and the obstacles they may have overcome to be there.

This research examined: a) the extent of diversity that exists among entering college freshmen's learning styles; b) whether, and the extent to which, learning style is influenced by gender; and c) whether high school grade point average (HS/GPA) is a determining factor in academic success. The Productivity Environmental Preference Survey (PEPS) (Dunn, Dunn, & Price, 2002) was administered to approximately 1500 entering college freshmen during orientation. PEPS data revealed statistical differences among students' styles for the elements of Sound, Light, Temperature, Motivation, and Responsibility. Pearson Correlations indicated that students with the highest HS/GPAs preferred either Learning Alone or with an Authoritative Figure and in the Late Morning or Afternoon, as opposed to the Evening while studying new and difficult academic material. Students with high, but not the highest HS/GPAs had strong preferences for Bright Light (p < .049) and Formal Seating (p < .001). Those same students simultaneously evidenced high Motivation (p < .001), Persistence (p < .001), and Responsibility (p < .001) levels, and preferred Evening as their optimal time for learning challenging material. Students with the lowest HS/GPAs also preferred learning in the Evening, but with Sound (music or conversation in the environment), Bright Light and, although Motivated, required frequent opportunities for Mobility while learning. Concerning freshman gender differences, although male students indicated a stronger need for learning with an Authority Figure, they also were more Visual, needed more Structure and Mobility, and were strongly Afternoon learners in comparison with the females in this sample. Conversely, female students revealed higher means for Bright Light, warm Temperature, Formal Seating, Motivation, Learning Alone or with Peers, Intake while concentrating, and a Variety of instructional approaches (rather than routines or patterns). Consistent with female traits internationally, this sample of freshman women had multiple Perceptual Strengths. Thus, they were more Auditory, Tactual, and Kinesthetic, and consistently more Persistent and Responsible than their male counterparts. Another variable on which these males and females differed were females' preferences for learning in the Late Morning in contrast with males' preferences for Afternoon learning. Only the variable of Kinesthetic revealed pair-wise differences between students in the Colleges of Business and Professional Studies in contrast with students in the College of Pharmacy and Allied Health. This information should help administrators and professors to plan more appropriately when scheduling and teaching diverse students. It also should guide those students toward doing their homework with strategies responsive to their styles.

Academic departments have expanded the typical persistence agenda of First-Year Seminars to use them specifically as tools for in-major retention. This article reports the empirical results of a four-year longitudinal study assessing the successful efforts to improve the persistence-to-graduation-within-major of business students. The pedagogy can be easily transferred to other campus majors. The approach used in this study linked a discipline-specific First-Year Seminar in business with the curriculum of an existing “traditional” business course, Introduction to Business. The study's results suggest that, in the first semester, a curriculum linkage between a First-Year Seminar and a traditional course in the same discipline may be an antidote to the lure that other disciplines have in swaying new students away from their original choice of major.