IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT PROCESSES OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS WITHIN A FIRST-YEAR EXPERIENCE COURSE: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Traditional measures of student success like retention and graduation rates are dismally low among community colleges. One of the most commonly used strategies to increase these bleak success rates is through the incorporation of first-year experience (FYE) courses. However, data indicate that their impact on such measures of student success are mixed and what’s more, many of these studies are limited by their use of predominantly quantitative methodologies that aggregate outcomes across students, masking the features of the FYE that may be more and less effective in promoting academic success among diverse students. Application of identity theories can help to fill this gap in understanding by offering theoretical frameworks from which to study this diverse population and deepen our understanding of their experiences. However, studies of identity with community college students are even fewer in number and often focus only on one narrow aspect of identity, such as racial and ethnic identity or age. Thus, they fail to fully capture the dynamic, complex, multifaceted, and context-dependent construct of identity. In this dissertation, I explore the unique experiences, challenges, and needs of four community college students taking the same FYE course at a large metropolitan community college in the Northeast United States and offer information about the course's features that most promoted development adaptive college student role identities (CSRIs) among participants. In this study, I conceptualize students' experiences in the FYE course as based in their emerging identities as community college students and adopted two theoretical frameworks to guide this study. The PRESS model designates the professor as an agent for prompting identity exploration among her students by creating triggers the students designate as self-relevant, creating a sense of safety in the classroom, and scaffolding exploratory activities while the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (DSMRI) explicates the content, structure, and formation processes of identity and how they relate to experiences and actions. Utilizing a case study approach, one section of an FYE course was selected, and from it, four participants, and the professor, were interviewed. Course artifacts, such as homework assignments, were also used for data analysis. The findings from the PRESS analysis showed that many aspects of the course organically promoted many of the model's four principles; however, some were observed more often than others and they were not as meaningful for all participants equally. The findings from the DSMRI analysis revealed some commonalities among the four components of the model across participants but more so, the data revealed variations and divergence in their CSRI exploration and formation in the FYE context. The study ends with implications for theory, practice, and future research.