This study examines the relationship between psychosocial and study skill factors (PSFs) and college outcomes by meta-analyzing 109 studies. On the basis of educational persistence and motivational theory models, the PSFs were categorized into 9 broad constructs: achievement motivation, academic goals, institutional commitment, perceived social support, social involvement, academic self-efficacy, general self-concept, academic-related skills, and contextual influences. Two college outcomes were targeted: performance (cumulative grade point average; GPA) and persistence (retention). Meta-analyses indicate moderate relationships between retention and academic goals, academic self-efficacy, and academic-related skills (ps = .340, .359, and .366, respectively). The best predictors for GPA were academic self-efficacy and achievement motivation (ps = .496 and .303, respectively). Supplementary regression analyses confirmed the incremental contributions of the PSF over and above those of socioeconomic status, standardized achievement, and high school GPA in predicting college outcomes.

/pdf/do-psychosocial-and-study-skill-factors-predict-college-3pfzfiwl9u.pdf

Do Psychosocial and Study Skill Factors Predict College Outcomes? A Meta-Analysis.

Older, part-time, and commuter students have composed an increasingly larger portion of college student bodies. The reasons why these students drop out of school are not well understood. The purpose of this paper is to describe the rise in nontraditional enrollments, define the nontraditional undergraduate student, and develop a conceptual model of the attrition process for these students. The chief difference between the attrition process of traditional and nontraditional students is that nontraditional students are more affected by the external environment than by the social integration variables affecting traditional student attrition.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/1170245

A Conceptual Model of Nontraditional Undergraduate Student Attrition

This paper investigates the joint effects of academic self-efficacy and stress on the academic performance of 107 nontraditional, largely immigrant and minority, college freshmen at a large urban commuter institution. We developed a survey instrument to measure the level of academic self-efficacy and perceived stress associated with 27 college-related tasks. Both scales have high reliability, and they are moderately negatively correlated. We estimated structural equation models to assess the relative importance of stress and self-efficacy in predicting three academic performance outcomes: first-year college GPA, the number of accumulated credits, and college retention after the first year. The results suggest that academic self-efficacy is a more robust and consistent predictor than stress of academic success.

Self-Efficacy, Stress, and Academic Success in College.

The purpose of this study was to estimate a conceptual model of nontraditional student attrition. Data were gathered from 624 nontraditional (commuter, part-time) freshmen at a midwestern urban university enrolling 22,000 students. For these nontraditional students, dropout was a function of GPA and credit hours enrolled, as well as the utility of education for future employment, satisfaction with the student role, opportunity to transfer, and age affecting dropout through intent to leave. In addition, absence from class, age, high school performance, and ethnicity had indirect effects on dropout through GPA. These results suggested that nontraditional students dropped out of college for academic reasons or because they were not committed to attending the institution, but their reasons for leaving were unrelated to social factors at school. The findings helped validate the conceptual model.

The estimation of a conceptual model of nontraditional undergraduate student attrition

The dramatic growth in student numbersassociated with the shift from elite to masssystems across virtually all developedcountries is central to current transformationsin terms of structure, purpose, social andeconomic role of higher education. As a part ofthis process of expansion and heterogenization,new groups of students who, for a complex rangeof social, economic and cultural reasons weretraditionally excluded from orunder-represented in higher education, mightbe expected to participate in increasingnumbers. The paper develops the concept ofnon-traditional learners and demonstrateshow an examination of ways in which highereducation systems respond to such learners canprovide a fruitful basis for a comparativeanalysis of change in higher education acrossten countries – Austria, Australia, Canada,Germany, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Sweden,United Kingdom, and the United States. Theprimary emphasis in the study was on theinstitutional and policy issues which appearedto either inhibit or support participation bynon-traditional learners. On this basis sixfactors were identified which seemed to beparticularly influential with regard to theparticipation of non-traditional students andthe associated moves towards a lifelonglearning mode of higher education.

Participation and exclusion: A comparative analysis of non-traditional students and lifelong learners in higher education

Who are adult learners in higher education, and how do they differ from younger college students? In this chapter, the author presents an overview of adult student enrollment patterns, their participation motivators, and their lifestyle differences from younger college students.

Setting the Stage: Adults in Higher Education

This study explores adult undergraduate beliefs about their construction of knowledge in the class-room and the relationships between such knowledge and their adult roles outside the classroom. Five belief structures, called “knowledge voices,” were delineated from interviews with 90 adult students. These belief structures included the entry voice, the outside voice, the cynical voice, the straddling voice, and the inclusion voice. Each of these five knowledge voices suggests a particular construction of the adult student learning world, perceptions of knowledge, and understandings of relationships between the collegiate classroom and the adult learners’ worlds of work, family, self, and community.

/pdf/adult-meaning-making-in-the-undergraduate-classroom-2peq0bpugy.pdf

Adult Meaning Making In The Undergraduate Classroom

Adult undergraduate student identities at research extensive universities were uniquely coconstructed, shaped by this selective and competitive youth-oriented cultural context. Drawing upon social constructivist theory, this study explored this coconstruction through positional and relational adult student identities. Positional identities were coconstructed through negotiating academic acceptance in meeting demanding academic challenges and through facing otherness as a mature adult. These adults also viewed their positional identity based in an evolving sense of agency to academically succeed through goal oriented efforts, as well as through their adult maturity and life experiences. These adults articulated relational identities predominantly based in faculty’s tacit or explicit academic acceptance of them in one of four types of relationships. This study suggests that the adult undergraduate student identity is multi-layered, multi-sourced, evolving, and at times, paradoxical in beliefs of self, posit...

Adult Learners in a Research University: Negotiating Undergraduate Student Identity

What is the nature of an adult student identity? Based in social constructivist theory, this study explored coconstructed understandings of culturally and socially mediated student identities throu...

Adult Student Identity in an Intergenerational Community College Classroom

Through acts of hope, adults face four challenges of emotion in their pursuits of collegiate learning.

/pdf/emotional-challenges-of-adult-learners-in-higher-education-41oumbsz1l.pdf

Carol E. Kasworm

Papers

Setting the Stage: Adults in Higher Education

Adult Meaning Making In The Undergraduate Classroom

Adult Learners in a Research University: Negotiating Undergraduate Student Identity

Adult Student Identity in an Intergenerational Community College Classroom

Emotional challenges of adult learners in higher education