Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle: Research, Propositions and Recommendations (review)

Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzleis a succinct and readable summary of the extant literature on student success, with specific recommendations for practitioners seeking to facilitate its attainment. The authors pay particular attention to students who are at risk of premature departure and/or members of historically underrepresented groups.

As with any discussion of student success, the first obstacle is defining it. The definition must be broad enough to include various institutional missions and individual goals, while being specific enough to allow for precise measurement. In attempting to meet both of these demands, the authors define student success as "academic achievement; engagement in educationally purposeful activities; satisfaction; acquisition of desired knowledge, skills and competencies; persistence; and attainment of educational objectives" (p. 10). A tall order! Fortunately, the authors consider each of these outcomes to be independently indicative of student success and do not maintain that they are all necessary for students to be deemed successful.

With this definition in place, the authors then present a graphic model of the influences on student success, which serves as the framework for their analysis. This model, in and of itself, clearly conveys the entirety of the authors' conception of student success. The model resembles a neuron, with students' pre-college experiences as dendrites bringing their influences into the college experience cell body, which contains student behaviors and institutional conditions, and has student engagement as its nucleus.

The cell membrane of the college experience is permeated by external forces, and there are what the authors refer to as "mediating conditions," such as remediation, financial aid and transfer, which may impede progress through the cell. Finally, grades and learning gains constitute the axon leading away from the cell body and toward post-college outcomes such as employment and graduation school, where students must then jump the synaptic gap, as it were, to the next significant experience.

Using this model, the authors go on to discuss the research relevant to the influences of students' precollege characteristics, college experiences, and institutional conditions on student success. They paint a dismal picture of students' chances of accessing, affording, and persisting in higher education, citing extensive literature on poor academic preparation and performance, rising tuition costs, inadequate financial aid, and the low participation rates of minority and low-income students.

These challenges are made to seem even more daunting when the authors discuss the pre-college characteristics that research has found to facilitate student success. Overall, the characteristics that students come to college with tend to be the factors most strongly associated with student success. Unfortunately, these characteristics (such as SES, race and ethnicity, generational status, aspirations, parental expectations, academic preparation, and attendance patterns) are realities that college administrators and student-affairs professionals can do little, if anything at all, to change.

Some hope is offered with the discussion of the importance of student engagement and its influence on student success. The authors focus on social integration and engagement, but not on academic integration, citing a lack of research linking academic integration to persistence. Additionally, the authors choose not to address cognitive development and direct measures of student learning as pieces of their student success "puzzle," again citing insufficient research and referring readers to Pascarella and Terenzini (2005) for a summary. This seems an unfortunate omission as cognitive development and student learning are arguably the most important aspects of student success. The discussion of student engagement research, however, is extremely thorough and current and provides a strong framework for the policy and practice recommendations the authors later present.

The authors go on to discuss the effects of institutional characteristics, practices, and culture on student engagement and subsequent student success. They note that most institutional characteristics seem to be insignificant once student characteristics are accounted for. However, institutional culture, specifically a student-centered culture, seems...