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The Role of Non-cognitive Variables in Identifying Community College Students in Need of Targeted Supports

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Abstract

Non-academic characteristics and traits, such as academic self-efficacy and conscientiousness, have maintained the interest of higher education researchers for decades. A considerable amount of research has found that these non-cognitive variables (NCVs) are generally predictive of undergraduate success. However, most prior studies have focused on the use of NCVs in 4-year colleges, and understanding if and how these measures predict the academic trajectories of community college students has received less attention. As past work has indicated that NCVs are differentially predictive for students from different backgrounds, such an examination is needed. Drawing on data from two diverse community colleges, our study addresses this need by exploring if seven popular NCVs predict both short and longer-term student outcomes, how these measures are related to help-seeking behaviors, and their utility in identifying students at risk of serious academic failures. We find statistically significant relationships between NCVs and GPA outcomes but conclude that their practical utility appears trivial.

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Notes

  1. National Center for Education Statistics, 2017 Digest of Education Statistics Table 333.10.

  2. The label non-cognitive has rightfully received significant animus from various factions of the research community. Easton (2013) described it as the term “everybody hates…but everyone knows roughly what you mean when you use it and no one has a much better alternative” (p. 8). The term, originally intended to distinguish a set of individual traits and constructs from better known and more easily measured ability metrics, has been used to refer to a wide array of psycho-social variables, many of which clearly do involve cognitive processes. Indeed, as Duckworth and Yeager (2015) state, “every facet of psychological functioning, from perception to personality, is inherently ‘cognitive’” (p. 238). A number of other terms (e.g. character, virtue, social and emotional learning competencies, twenty-first century skills, soft skills, among others) have been proposed, all with their own advocates and critics (Duckworth and Yeager 2015). We readily acknowledge that the term non-cognitive is problematic and should be retired, but have decided to use it in this paper as it has a long history and a relatively clear meaning among the wider higher education community, including both researchers and practitioners (e.g.. Jaschik 2017).

  3. Source: IPEDS, Public, 2-year institutions, Fall 2015. Percentages are weighted by institution size.

  4. Based on discussions with institutional researchers at the colleges. The common application for California Community Colleges did not collect information on Middle Eastern or North African students at the time of study. In December of 2018, the options for ethnicities were expanded to include 194 categories from the prior 21 categories. The new categories now include 13 options for Middle Eastern and North African students.

  5. Students who attended a California high school for 3 or more years can qualify to pay resident tuition at public higher education institutions (California Education Code AB 540). This measure is often used as a proxy for undocumented status.

  6. EOPS a state-funded program that provides economically and socially disadvantaged students financial and academic support. It exists at all California Community Colleges.

  7. Major terms include fall and spring terms (excluding summer terms).

  8. Some of the students who were missing high school GPA were also missing other measures, most notably English placement scores. Many of these students were international students and thus qualified for ESL coursework.

  9. Indeed, models that do not include measures of high school academic performance provide meaningfully different estimates of the relationship between NCVs and outcomes. We address this in the section “improving the targeting of support services.”

  10. All students at these schools are required to visit the counselor prior to their first academic term to discuss the classes they are planning on taking. We do not include these pre-academic visits in our count.

  11. Another approach through which we could examine if these behaviors act as mediators would be to conduct a path analysis in which we examine the direct and indirect coefficients on the NCV variables as they predict outcomes. In general, we find similar results when we use this approach: number of counselor visits does not appear to act as a mediator between any of the NCVS and college outcomes.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Office of Research, Planning and Accreditation, Irvine Valley College, 5500 Irvine Center Drive, Irvine, CA, 92618, USA

    Loris P Fagioli

  2. School of Education, University of California, Irvine, 2060 Education, Irvine, CA, 92697-4150, USA

    Rachel Baker

  3. School of Education, University of California, Irvine, 3200 Education, Irvine, CA, 92697-4150, USA

    Gabe Avakian Orona

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  1. Loris P Fagioli
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  2. Rachel Baker
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  3. Gabe Avakian Orona
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Correspondence to Gabe Avakian Orona.

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Fagioli, L.P., Baker, R. & Orona, G.A. The Role of Non-cognitive Variables in Identifying Community College Students in Need of Targeted Supports. Res High Educ 61, 725–763 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-020-09588-7

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