Leading Institutions Through Change to Improve Learning

Student success in higher education depends on a complex set of services that must be integrated seamlessly and delivered to students. This chapter looks at the complex, and often competing, interests of students, faculty, administration, and external stakeholders as they seek to improve student success in higher education. Administrators, mid-level managers, change agents, faculty and ancillary student support services all need to understand the importance of their role in working together to make the changes necessary to improve teaching and learning. The great challenge is managing the change that this will require. Educational institutions in the 21st century need to become agile and able to manage change imposed by both internal and external pressures.

Creating Conditions for Student Success: Social justice perspectives from a South African university

The various chapters of this book have brilliantly provided perspectives on creating conditions for success in higher education from a wide variety of stakeholders within a university environment. The rich content comes from varying fields of study as well as academic development and student affairs directorates within the institution. This is what is exciting about the book. The diversity of focus in chapters makes the book relevant to anyone with interest in higher education matters. From the opening to the closing chapter, students are making a contribution on what the university has done or is doing for them to succeed or what it should consider doing to improve its service to students. This touches on every environment that students find themselves in a university setting, from residences, to the classroom to commuter or off-campus students. The book’s extended use of the capabilities approach and critical social theories has enabled it to provide nuances on not only the success of students, but, more importantly, about how the higher education environment can transform itself to practices relevant for the sector today. The various research studies in this book can benefit similar university contexts nationally and internationally.

Historically Underrepresented Students Redefining College Success in Higher Education

Extant definitions of college success largely focus on macro-level academic outcomes including academic achievement, retention, and persistence, which are linked to a limited set of indicators achievable by students including high grade averages, extra-curricular involvement, and leadership that denote a successful college student. These normative ideas of college success sustain ideologies that dismiss the multiplicity of ways students experience success in college and most importantly, they define who can and cannot be characterized as a successful college student. Relatedly, the dominant narrative of college success frames historically underrepresented college students (e.g. first-generation, low-income, students of color) as deficient and as less likely to be successful, even though these students consistently have to overcome greater adversity during their college trajectories and consequently experience many victories that are not legitimized as a success. Therefore, the purpose of this manuscript is to propose a more inclusive definition of the term college success that accounts for the diverse realities of students historically underrepresented and reveals the direct connection between student success and institutional success. Authors draw evidence from two research studies to illustrate their proposed definition of college success and provide implications for research, practice, and policy.

Increasing Success in Higher Education: The Relationships of Online Course Taking With College Completion and Time-to-Degree

Online courses provide flexible learning opportunities, but research suggests that students may learn less and persist at lower rates compared to face-to-face settings. However, few studies have investigated more distal effects of online education. In this study, we analyzed 6 years of institutional data for three cohorts of students in 13 large majors (N = 10,572) at a public research university to examine distal effects of online course participation. Using online course offering as an instrumental variable for online course taking, we find that online course taking of major-required courses leads to higher likelihood of successful 4-year graduation and slightly accelerated time-to-degree. These results suggest that offering online courses may help students to more efficiently graduate college.

DACA Funds of Knowledge: Testimonios of Access to and Success in Higher Education

Using testimonios, we highlight six current university Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) students’ funds of knowledge, or the lived experiences and culturally developed skills, specific to being DACA recipients, that these students leveraged in the past, currently lean on now for continued success, and learn what resources are lacking at university. Sharing these students’ “DACA funds of knowledge,” of navigating public education to successfully attend institutions of higher education, provides insight into equitable educational paths for those who follow.

What Lies Beneath: The Role of Self-Efficacy, Causal Attribution Habits, and Gender in Accounting for the Success of College Students

Existing research has identified gender as a driving variable of student success in higher education: women attend college at a higher rate and are also more successful than their male peers. We build on the extant literature by asking whether specific cognitive variables (i.e., self-efficacy and causal attribution habits) distinguish male and female students with differing academic performance levels. Using a case study, we collected data from students enrolled in a general education course (sample size N = 400) at a large public university in the United States. Our findings indicate that while students’ course grades and cumulative college grades did not vary by gender, female and male students reported different self-efficacy and causal attribution habits for good grades and poor grades. To illustrate, self-efficacy for female students is broad and stretches across all their courses; in contrast, for male students, it is more limited to specific courses. These gender differences in cognition, particularly in accounting for undesirable events, may assist faculty members and advisors in understanding how students respond to difficulties and challenges.

Students Lead the Charge! Using Project-Based Learning with Pre-service Teachers to Redesign a Curriculum Resource Center

Project-based learning (PBL) allows students to identify and find solutions to real-world problems using inquiry-based learning. With the exception of Correll and Bornstein (2018), very little has been written about using PBL to redesign college and university Curriculum Resource Centers. The authors of this article used PBL in conjunction with the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Guidelines for Curriculum Materials Centers (CMCs) and the three themes for PBL success in higher education identified by Lee et al. (2014) to work with a small class of upper-level elementary education pre-service teachers to redesign an academic library Curriculum Resource Center.

Exploring the Effect of the Flipped Classroom Model on EFL Phonology Students’ Academic Achievement

Recent research has shown that the flipped model had a great success in higher education. Yet, there are very limited experimental studies that prove its effects on EFL students’ academic achievement in Moroccan higher education. The central objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of the flipped model in an EFL Phonology course and its effect on students’ academic achievement. The sample was composed of 156 participants (n=156) of two intact groups of EFL phonology course at two Moroccan higher education institutions. In a semester-long study, the phonology course was taught using the flipped model. Working with the existing intact classrooms made the study adopt a quasi-experiment design. The teacher inverted the course by offering lectures via videos for students to view at home using the free online platform Edpuzzle and then followed up by providing activities and more practice in the classroom. Quantitative data were gathered using self-designed achievement test as a pre-test and post-test for both control and experimental groups. The results revealed a significant increase in the participants’ academic achievement in the experimental group in comparison to the control group.