Using Longitudinal Data to Improve the Experiences and Engagement of First-Year Students

Students enter campuses with a variety of high school academic and co-curricular experiences, family backgrounds, and other factors that influence and shape their expectations and attitudes toward college, as well as their actual experiences and success in college. Therefore, to better understand first-year student engagement, it makes sense to consider the background and precollege characteristics of entering college students. To do this effectively, however, requires access to longitudinal data that connect student-level precollege information with actual first-year experiences. This chapter has two goals. The first is to briefly describe the relationship between precollege student characteristics such as their high school engagement and their engagement expectations for the first year of college with their subsequent first-year engagement and experiences. The second is to present concrete examples of how campuses can use longitudinal data to better understand the experiences and engagement patterns of their first-year students. (Contains 1 table.)