Student Success Modeling: Elementary School to College (review)

Despite continued progress in increasing access to postsecondary education for all students, overall completion rates hover near 50%, suggesting a need to better understand the mechanisms that foster student success in different educational settings. The theoretical and methodological complexity that underlies satisfactory progress toward completion of an educational program represents the crux of Raymond Padilla's new book, Student Success Modeling: Elementary School to College. In this book, Padilla argues that student success is embedded within a series of dynamic and mutually reinforcing conjugate models that give special attention to the situated contexts (i.e., historical, cultural, political, and theoretical) that influence and produce educational decisions and outcomes.

In this regard, students approach various issues, problems, and concerns using cognitive, conative, and evaluative strategies that are moderated by various contextual considerations and influences. While the thrust of the book focuses on theoretical and empirical models of student success, the emphasis placed at the onset of the book on the intricacy of modeling student success reinforces the importance of situating discussions of student success in their appropriate local context.

Additionally, in advocating for a strengthsbased model that focuses on how students become successful, as opposed to one that takes a deficit approach anchored in student departure, Padilla offers a refreshing and highly personalized approach to improving success within the American educational system.

The book relies heavily on Padilla's Expertise Model of Student Success (EMSS), a conceptualization that approximates Astin's (1993) I-E-O model in examining student success. The model, however, assumes that success is largely contingent on a student's ability to use his or her heuristic (e.g., informal, experientially based "rules of thumb") and academic (formal, course-based) expertise to overcome barriers to academic progress and graduation. Both heuristic and academic expertise mirror Tinto's (1987) earlier writings on social and academic integration, respectively, although Padilla emphasizes the importance of students gaining heuristic knowledge early in their careers, thus enabling them to navigate and understand the various systems necessary for success.

Gaining expertise in the formal and informal campus environment, however, is not enough to facilitate success; rather, students also need to develop conative strategies that translate their expertise into effective solutions. The simplicity of the EMSS model may appeal to many practitioners weary of overly complicated, kitchen-sink models of student success, although Padilla seems to overlook many of the advancements in higher education research, particularly those studies that have uncovered important information related to barriers, knowledge, and action strategies at individual and school levels.

The EMSS model is actualized through an inductive process at the local school level, in which qualitative approaches are used to identify the barriers, knowledge, and actions experienced by successful students. The evaluation begins by conducting focus groups with three groups of students, preferably groups that are representative of the school's diversity and which have sufficient educational experience (e.g., upperclassmen). As the process unfolds, the evaluators compile examples from successful students across each EMSS category and conduct a taxonomic analysis that illustrates within-group and between-group linkages.

In a wonderful illustration of the virtues of qualitative designs, Padilla discusses at length how his own experiences in the academy led to the development of the qualitative approach used to empirically validate the EMSS model. The qualitative approach, however, leaves a number of unanswered questions, particularly those pertaining to sampling approaches, criteria used to identify "successful students," and how to effectively train the facilitators in this type of exercise. It is also unclear where a project like this is typically housed and whether three focus groups provide enough information and representation to effectively draw conclusions about student success at a given school.

The majority of the book is devoted to applications of the EMSS model in an elementary, secondary, community college, and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) setting. Padilla's graduate students served as the primary authors of these chapters, each of which provides an example of an EMSS model applied to...