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4 FOUR CRITICAL YEARS: A Methodological Review by J. Bruce Francis Associate Professor of Education State University of New York at Buffalo Astin's Four Critical Years, despite its large amount of data presenta­ tion and empirical emphasis, is not a research report and apparently was never intended to be. Rather is it a summary of findings and conclusions drawn from a massive and complex research effort, with major emphasis on the author's interpretations and suggestions for policy, and only a modicum of attention to methodological detail. Researchers will, as a consequence, pro­ bably find the book itself incomplete and insufficient to let them understand exactly how the study was carried out and how some of the conclusions and policy implications were derived. Less technically-oriented professionals, such as policymakers and decision-makers in higher education will, however, ask such broader questions of the study's methodology, as: 1. Do his inferences follow logically from an adequate analysis of ade­ quate data? 2. How widely and with what generality do his conclusions about higher education apply? For them the book will prove useful and enlightening, even if not entirely convincing. The purpose of this review is to assess the extent to which the study as presented in the book succeeds in providing answers to these questions . The first chapter and an appendix contain most of the methodological in­ formation from which to assess the study and the derivation of its conclu­ sions. These descriptions are persuasive, and clear enough to make this re­ viewer wish that technical research reports (however more complete) were as lucid. Particularly well-written are Astin's comparison of an industrial mo­ del with a medical model for studying student change and his discussion of the notion of prognosis; the comparison of these models go a long way toward establishing, justifying, and clarifying the extraordinarily complex analyses he has undertaken. The overall design of the study is longitudinal and multi-institutional, both characteristics in which it is clearly superior to most other studies of college impact and student change. Its multi-institutional nature (some 300 different colleges are included) makes possible more sensitive assessments of whether and how different kinds of institutions affect students; and in addi­ tion allows wider and more persuasive generalizing of the study's findings. Its longitudinal character overcomes the difficulty of having to infer stu­ dent change from data gathered about groups of different aged individuals at roughly the same time. The logic underlying the choice of variables used as both predictors and outcomes reflects a comprehensive conception of student change and college impact and a determination to avoid oversimplifying a highly complex subject. Astin employs the ”input-environment-outcome" model, which has been his trademark, to select the study's fifty-one predictor and eighty-four outcome variables; he further subdivides the outcome variables according to a) type of outcome, including cognitive and affective characteristics; b) type of da­ ta, including that pertaining to internal "psychological" states; and that pertaining to external "behavioral" manifestations. Simply put, he addresses both what a student thinks and what that student does; and c) a time dimen­ sion which includes both short-range and long-range changes influenced by go­ ing to college. This taxonomy of outcomes serves as a framework for the pre­ sentation of the study's major findings which decidedly enhances the book's flow and organization. 5 All measures of the outcome variables (with the possible exception of four) have been derived from student self-reports. This means that behavi­ oral outcomes are actually psychological and represent not strictly what stu­ dents have done but what they say they have done. This is a common limita­ tion of surveys, one almost impossible to avoid in a project with the scope of this one. Astin has taken care to explain carefully the logic which re­ lates behavior to perception, declaring for instance that "Data on behavioral outcomes were obtained by utilizing the students as observers of their own behavior" (p. 73). But the fact remains that the study is inherently one not of student change, but of student perceptions of how they change. Perhaps the project's most immediately striking...

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