Academic Course Engagement During One Semester Forecasts College Success: Engaged Students Are More Likely to Earn a Degree, Do It Faster, and Do It Better

The past several decades have witnessed an impressive array of studies that have attempted to identify and explain the factors important to the success and failure of students as they pursue a college education. The extent of this effort is not surprising given the impact that level of education has on a variety of life domains (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005) and given the difficulties universities have in retaining students (Braxton, 2001; Tinto, 1993). College success has been variously defined with a focus upon either performance outcomes, such as grades for individual courses or semesters; outcomes such as college persistence, often measured over one or two semesters; and, less frequently, degree attainment. Many of these studies have been guided by educational or engagement theories of student success (e.g., Bean, 1985; Tinto, 1993). These theories have focused upon student involvement in college and propose a distinctly contextual perspective: success is influenced by the degree to which students become engaged and involved in academic and other activities of college life. These engagement approaches emphasize what individuals do and what institutions do to encourage and support individual student involvement. Astin’s (1984) definition of student involvement captures the centrality of student actions and behaviors in engagement theorizing as well as the scope of behaviors that could reflect engagement: student involvement “refers to the amount of physical and psychological energy that the student devotes to the academic experience” (Astin, p. 297). Previous studies have often broadly measured academic engagement including such components as, for example, time and taskmanagement skills (Garavalia & Gredler, 2002; Trockel, Barnes, & Egget, 2000), seeking help from peers (Larose, Robinson, Roy, & Legault, 1998), and interactions with professors (Strage, 1999). Thus, academic engagement is broadly conceived and captures not just courserelated activities (e.g., class attendance, completion of assignments) but includes broadly defined involvement in academic life. Additionally, engagement is often measured by student intentions or perceptions of academic engagement, often captured by single items assessed at a single point in time. Although these measures provide important information regarding student intentions or perceptions, they do not necessarily inform us about students’ actual engagement behaviors. To address measurement shortcomings of single items representing a complex content domain, Handelsman, Briggs, Sullivan, and Towler (2005) explored the structure of a subset of academic engagement, student engagement in a single course. They developed a multiitem scale representing course engagement and analyzed the factor structure on a sample of students