Reading and Blogging as a Doctoral Student

Last month, I started a journey I will be on for the next five years.  I am pursuing a Doctor of Education degree with a focus on Leadership from Saint Mary's University in Minneapolis, MN.  Saint Mary's has an undergraduate campus in Winona, MN with about 1200 students, but has focused a great deal of attention on expanding their graduate and professional programs along with a degree completion program.  The program requires a two week residency with the rest of the program online.  I have really enjoyed meeting the members of my cohort and have been extremely impressed by the faculty.

As part of my research writing class, I am blogging on a weekly basis about two articles I read about my research topic.  My topic is evolving, but is centered on the effects of student engagement on persistence among different student demographic groups.  Recently, I have read some great journal articles about student engagement and persistence among high-risk college students.  What constitutes "high risk" differs by institution, but can include students who are required to take remedial courses, first generation students, and underrepresented students.

Since I am blogging for class, I would like to also post by journal reading summaries here at Renewing Leadership as a way to expand the conversation about how to help all student succeed in higher education.  Not all of my cohort members are professionals working in higher education, so I would certainly love any ideas and thoughts anyone has about my blogs.  Your comments might just inspire a new direction in the research I am currently and will continue to do.

These posts are probably going to look a lot different than typical posts, but hopefully you will forgive the style change.  Please enjoy the first blog I wrote a few weeks ago and let me know what you think!  I will post subsequent blogs as time goes by.  I just finished by 4th tonight!  Thanks for keeping up with me on this journey.  I am thankful to be in a profession that is incredibly encouraging and supportive!!

Without further ado, here is blog #1

Student Engagement and Persistence in College:

I was excited to find an article that connects directly to what I have been thinking about for my research question. The article appeared in April 2011 edition of Innovative Higher Education and is written by Dr. Shouping Hu, a Professor of Higher Education at Florida State University. The article detailed Dr. Hu’s study examining the relationship between student engagement in college activities and student persistence. Hu (2011) found through his statistical analysis that the levels of student engagement in social activities appeared to be positively correlated with student probability of persistence while students highly engaged in academic activities did not persist at a higher level. When combining the factors, Hu (2011) found that when low or middle levels of academic engagement were paired with high levels of social engagement, the probability of persistence increased. Without the middle or high level of social engagement, student highly engaged in academic activities did not persist at a higher rate. This article applies directly to my work in higher education and motivates me to wonder why the common thought among some students, faculty, administrators and parents is that social engagement is more of a distraction than an integral part of student success in college. Somehow the people in my line of work need to find ways to communicate this message broadly on college campuses and align our work toward the goal of student success.

I retrieved an article written earlier about the same subject that was cited in the Hu (2011) article. This article sought to understand the relationship between student engagement, academic achievement, and persistence among first year students in college and first year students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. To do this, the authors looked specifically at the impact of engagement during the first year on grade point average (GPA) and returning for the second year of college. The authors used data from the National Survey of Student Engagements (NSSE) and were able to control for several variables to determine the effects of student engagement on GPA and persistence to the second year by demographic information and prior academic achievement. The findings of this study concluded student engagement is positively related to first year student grades and persistence to the second year. Interestingly, the second main conclusion of the study is that exposure to educationally purposeful engagement has a greater positive effect for lower ability students and students of color compared with White students. The results of this study are talking points often referenced in my field; however, I wonder how many practitioners have read the methodology and understand how the researchers arrived at their conclusions. Reading this article and understanding the methodology has given me a greater appreciation for this conclusions and motivation to encourage others to read and understand these results.

Reference:

Hu, S. (2011). Reconsidering the relationship between student engagement and persistence in college. Innovative Higher Education, 36(2), 97-106.

Kuh, G.D., Cruce, T.M., Shoup, R., Kinzie, J., and Gonyea, R.M. (2008). Unmasking the effects of student engagement on first-year college grades and persistence. The Journal of Higher Education, 79(5), 540-563.