The Diagnostic Questionnaire Was Fast and Rough, But It Was Also Good Enough: We Can Identify Potential Dropouts from among Freshmen Entering California Community Colleges: Here for the First Time Is a Close Look at the Most Important NorCal Potential Dropout Diagnostic Questionnaire Items and Their Respective Simplified Response Weightings.

This review of the Northern California (NorCal) Cooperative Research Project on Student Attrition, which was conducted between 1968 and 1970, provides detailed information on how to use the findings of the study to identify those students who are most likely to drop out of college during their first term. Chapter I provides background information on the study, its major purposes, and the research design. Chapter II focuses on Phase 1 of the study, which attempted to describe the characteristics of first-time, full-time, day freshmen who discontinued their enrollment during the first semester or quarter. Chapter III reviews Phase 2 of the study, during which an instrument to identify the high dropout potential student was developed and validated. Chapter IV considers the experimental and quasi-experimental research conducted at individual colleges during Phase 3 to reduce student attrition. Chapter V explains how to weight the five factors which were revealed as predictive of student withdrawal during their first term of attendance: (1) sex correlated with aptitude test scores; (2) race; (3) educational goals; (4) parental encouragement of college attendance; and (5) importance of college to the student. This chapter explains that by adding the weighted values for these five variables potential dropouts can be identified. Chapter VI discusses how these weightings can be used. The survey instrument and a bibliography are appended. (HB)