Exploring Relationships between Student Engagement and Student Outcomes in Community Colleges: Report on Validation Research. Working Paper

In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field's understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement ("CCSSE") respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the "CCSSE" survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, "CCSSE's" survey instrument. The pattern of results obtained from the Florida study broadly confirms positive relationships between the construct of student engagement as measured by "CCSSE" and community college outcomes. This Achieving the Dream study yielded mixed results. The most promising results were for academic achievement (cumulative GPA) and persistence (credit completion ratios and fall-to-fall retention). Less promising were the results when predicting course completions across developmental math, writing and reading, as well as college-level algebra and English. In the HSS study, the student engagement scales were predictors of both "CCSSE" self-reported outcomes and transcript-derived student outcomes. Overall, two student engagement scales--Academic Challenge and Support for Learners--were the most consistent predictors of student outcomes. Overall, results clearly demonstrate that in assessing the validity of the "CCSSE", the choice of student outcomes variables is very important. The analyses accounted for larger proportions of variance in cumulative GPA, total credit hours completed, and average credit hours than in first to second term persistence, first to third term persistence, and number of terms enrolled. Further, depending on the student outcome of interest, some "CCSSE" self-reported outcomes seemed to be good proxies for transcript-derived outcomes, specifically cumulative GPA and total credit hours earned. Overall, many of the "CCSSE" variables, as well as corresponding derived scales and factors, demonstrated solid relationships with both self-reported and transcript-derived student outcomes. The results of these studies point to the following overall conclusions: (1) There is strong support for the validity of the use of the CCSR as a measure of institutional processes and student behaviors that impact student outcomes; (2) The studies confirm a long tradition of research findings linking engagement to positive academic outcomes; (3) There is strong consistency in the relationship between engagement factors and outcome measures across the three studies; however, some outcomes have stronger relationships to engagement than others; and (4) The Support for Learners benchmark was consistently correlated with measures of persistence. Appended are: (1) Florida Community College System Validation Study Results; (2) Achieving the Dream Validation Study Results; (3) HSS Consortium Institutions Validation Study Results; (4) "CCSSE" Constructs; (5) Study Variables; and (6) Participating Institutions. (Contains 71 tables, 8 figures and 4 footnotes.) [For related report, "Student Engagement and Student Outcomes: Key Findings from "CCSSE" Validation Research," see ED529076.]