High Impact Practices (HIPs)

Objective: Beyond understanding whether first-year student success interventions in community colleges are effective--for which there is mixed evidence in the literature--this study's purpose was to uncover how they work to realize observed outcomes, including at times unanticipated undesirable outcomes. Method: This qualitative multiple case study used cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) to unpack interactions and tensions among programmatic-level features and individual-level experiences and actions. We conducted classroom observation, document analysis, and interviews with instructors and students in four student success courses across diverse contexts. Results: Regardless of particular designs and course emphases, we found in all cases a blurring of activity elements, wherein learning tools and learning goals were often coterminous, or instructors effectively took on the role of learning tools themselves, in the form of object lessons and mediators, for instance. Courses had a distinctive character as rehearsal for college that simultaneously created a welcoming peer environment but an uncertain learning and assessment environment. Contributions: Because of their nature as metacourses--college courses about college-going--success courses' means and ends ultimately may be functionally inseparable, thus helping to explain their continual evolution and contested roles. Whereas such courses are typically justified as means to teach college skills, we found this utilitarian rationale to be insufficient to describe the experiential dimensions of social learning that participants reported. Instead, we found these courses reveal how college-going is an emergent social literacy, one that a single course is insufficient to fully realize.

This chapter examines community college first-year experience programs using critical race theory and ecological theory. The study draws on diverse students' experiences with access, support, and long-term success within community colleges to assess how these programs foster student success, as told through the voices of student participants.

This chapter draws from national data to explore unique attributes of first-year seminars in community college contexts as well as high-impact practices that are often connected to them. Findings point to areas of opportunity for practice and directions for future research to better understand how community colleges can be poised to meet the increasing number of demands to support student success in effective ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We begin with a high-level review of the academic and practitioner literature on first-year supports, with a focus on the two-year sector. Next, we report the results of a new, national survey of institutions serving two-year students, presenting key trends and lessons learned on the scope of their first-year programming, which we complement with information gathered from interviews with a small subset of those institutions. We also present findings regarding first-year programming targeting specific subgroups of students, including high-achieving, low-income students.