Course-triggered Identity Exploration, Motivation, and Success among Community College Students

Abstract

In this dissertation, I seek to extend motivational and identity research conducted in other educational contexts to the community college setting in an effort to provide insights into the relatively lower rates of academic success experienced by community college students. The purpose of this dissertation research is to explore the nature and prevalence of motivational orientations, identity processing styles, and course-triggered identity exploration among community college students, the relation of these orientations/processing styles/exploratory actions to one another and to students’ academic outcomes, and to attempt to promote adaptive identity exploration around an academic curriculum for remedial college students. The theoretical frameworks that guide this dissertation research are Achievement Goal theory (Ames, 1992), Brezonsky’s (1989) identity processing style, and Flum and Kaplan’s (2006) perspective on identity exploration and its promotion in educational settings (Kaplan, Sinai & Flum, 2014). This dissertation comprises three studies that utilize data collected over the course of two semesters: the fall semester of 2012 and the fall semester of 2014 at Montgomery County Community College in Pennsylvania. The three studies encapsulate a progressive process that aimed to map community college students’ goal orientations, identity processing styles, and experiences of course-triggered identity exploration and their relations with expected course outcomes, to establish conceptual and empirical support for the relations between identity exploration in the community college classroom and students’ adaptive goal orientations and identity processing styles, and to implement an intervention aimed to facilitate remedial community college students’ identity exploration within the curriculum and investigate these students’ experiences of motivation, identity processing, and course-triggered identity exploration over the course of the semester. The first study investigated the nature of and the relations amongst students’ course-triggered identity exploration, identity processing styles, achievement goal orientations, self-efficacy, and expected academic outcomes in the community college classroom. The study involved analysis of community college students’ self-report data from a survey (assessing the aforementioned constructs) administered to 100 students (39 males, 61 females) in an introductory psychology course. Results indicated that students most strongly adopted mastery-approach orientations and informational-oriented processing styles in the course. Results also suggested that mastery orientations and informational-oriented processing styles are conceptually related, as are performance orientations and normative and diffuse-avoidant processing styles. Additionally, mastery-avoidance orientations and self-efficacy were found to be significantly positively correlated with students’ expected course grades. The second study investigated the qualitative manifestations of these community college students’ experiences of identity exploration in the introductory psychology course, in order to arrive at conceptual insights as to the personal and contextual features involved in adaptive identity exploration in the community college classroom, as well as the conceptual definition and experiential meaning of course-triggered identity exploration in the community college context. This study involved analysis of open-ended qualitative data collected from the same survey used in the first study, which asked students to explain, in their own words, their experiences of identity exploration in the course. Of the 100 students who took the survey in Study 1, 92 provided qualitative feedback to the open-ended item. Results from the qualitative analysis of students’ responses indicated that 70% of student responses (n=65) indicated course-triggered identity exploration. Additionally, analysis of these students’ qualitative feedback suggested that five dimensions characterized students’ descriptions of course-triggered identity exploration: trigger, cognitive action, self-target, purpose, and time. The third study investigated the relations among students’ motivations, identity processing styles, course-triggered identity exploration, and academic outcomes studied in the first two studies; only this time within a unique context in the community college – remedial English courses. This study also sought to use a design-study approach to investigate the effects of course activities implemented to promote students’ identity exploration and to examine the trajectory of identity exploration over the course of a semester, and its relation to changes in students’ motivational orientations and identity processing styles. The study involved a semester-long researcher-instructor collaborative intervention in two developmental English courses at the community college. The intervention consisted of a theory-informed collaborative design of course activities that aimed to facilitate students’ identity exploration within the curriculum. Data collected included pre-post intervention surveys assessing students’ identity processing styles, achievement goals, and self-efficacy, post-intervention scales assessing students’ course-triggered identity exploration, reflective writing assignments that students completed as part of the intervention during the semester, a final identity-related assignment that students completed at the end of the course, and students’ expected course grades. A total of 17 students participated in at least one facet of Study 3 (e.g. surveys, reflective writings, etc.). Demographic information was provided by 13 students (males=6, females=7). Overall, results from the study supported the dimensional framework of course-triggered identity exploration derived in Study 2. However, results also indicated variation, with regard to the frequencies with which dimensions were evidenced in students’ writing, between the students in Study 2 and Study 3. The qualitative analysis also suggested that while students’ experiences/trajectories of identity exploration over the course of the semester may be individualized, prototypical trajectories may exist and certain course features may be more conducive to facilitating exploration than others for particular students.