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George Kuh, Jillian Kinzie, Jennifer A. Buckley, Brian K. Bridges, and John C. Hayek. Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle: Research, Propositions and Recommendations. ASHE Higher Education Report, Volume 32, Number 5. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007. 200 pp. Paper: $28.00. ISBN: 0-787-99776-5.
Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle is 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...