One fundamental aspect of engagement in higher education is faculty-student interaction. Faculty-student interaction has been associated with student success and persistence in both four- and two-year higher education institutions. Due to a lack of research concerning community college students, understanding student engagement in higher education is based on White, traditional-age students who attend four-year institutions. However, community colleges enroll almost half of US undergraduates. Community college studentsâ€"!primary involvement or interaction typically occurs inside the classroom due to their part-time status, employment responsibilities, lack of involvement in student activities, and attendance at non-residential campuses. Increasing faculty-student interaction does seem to be a possible approach to assist students in their educational endeavors while enrolled at community colleges. Only a limited number of researchers have examined faculty-student interaction in a community college setting. The purpose of this study was to explore the variables that predict faculty-student interaction of community college students. This research project was guided by two theories that examine student engagement and faculty-student interaction: Astinâ€"! (1985) student involvement theory and Paceâ€"! (1979) student development and college impress model. Descriptive and inferential statistics examined the data and answered three research questions. Of the 15 independent variables, multiple regression revealed that five (age, grants/scholarships, GPA, orientation program/course, and learning community) were significant predictors of faculty-student interaction for full-time community college students and four (first-generation status, GPA, orientation program/course, and learning community) were significant predictors of faculty-student interaction for part-time community college students. Both models had three of the same significant independent variables (GPA, orienta.

Keywords: community college, engagement, involvement, Astin, Pace, faculty-student interaction.

Improving student outcomes in community college online education requires understanding how institutional practices and student characteristics affect levels of student engagement in online courses. This study investigated community college online student engagement using an ex post facto quantitative methodology, reporting the results of an online survey administered to students enrolled in online courses at four community colleges and one statewide community college online consortium in the fall 2009 academic term. Online engagement levels were measured based on five constructs from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement (Active and Collaborative Learning, Student-Faculty Interaction, Academic Challenge, Student Effort, and Support for Learners) and a sixth construct from the literature (Presence). The study measured the engagement levels of 906 survey respondents taking classes exclusively online compared with 1,179 survey respondents taking classes both online and on-campus. Differences in engagement levels also were explored in terms of student characteristics including gender, race/ethnicity, age (traditional/nontraditional), enrollment status; experience in online classes, and veteran status. The results of this study revealed the following: Community college online students are less engaged than students taking courses both online and on campus. Enrollment status is a strong predictor of online student engagement; online students enrolled part-time are substantially less engaged than online students enrolled full-time. Experience with online learning is another strong predictor of engagement; as students gain experience in online courses, they become more engaged online learners. Student demographics appear to play less of a role in student engagement online than on campus. Although measurably less engaged, online students scored high on Student Effort, suggesting respondents found courses taught exclusively online required substantial individual effort. Online students are isolated relative to other students and faculty, and are unlikely to reach out to make connections within the college community without assistance. Based on their distinctive experiences and characteristics, online students should be tracked as a unique cohort within community college student populations. This study concludes with recommendations for further research and strategies that community colleges could implement to increase online student engagement, retention, and ultimately success.

This study explored how community college students perceive certain faculty behaviors, its relationship with students' classroom motivators and how the perception of those behaviors and motivators predicts students' persistence and academic success. The statistics about the low rates of completion in higher education institutions is an issue that researchers and educational organizations are concerned about (Apolinar, 2013; Kolodner, 2015). Addressing this issue, a body of inquiring is focusing on the student-faculty relationship (Kezar & Maxey, 2014) revealing that faculty behaviors and student motivation are related to several students' outcomes (Lancaster & Lundberg, 2019; Wilson & Ryan, 2013). However, less is known regarding effective behaviors for community college faculty that help foster student success (Alexander, Karvonen, Ulrich, Davis, & Wade, 2012; Khandelwal, 2009). Such knowledge is needed in the Dominican Republic (DR), where the community college model is recently being implemented. The research design of this study was a quantitative descriptive and predictive nonexperimental research design, using an online survey. The sample consisted of 352 students from the first and only DR community college. The data was analyzed using independent T-Tests, ANOVA, Canonical Correlation Analysis, logistic and hierarchical multiple regressions. Overall, results indicate that faculty qualities and behaviors accounts for 48.5% in the variance in students’ classroom motivation. Findings reveal in more detail which faculty qualities and behaviors directly or indirectly have a higher influence in student motivation, persistence, and GPA. For example, it was found that encouragement behaviors such as demonstrating cares for student's well-being and praising a student for a job well done, were good predictors of student intent to persist. Fairness, such have realistic expectations for students, has significant positive correlation with students' expectancy for success, while control behaviors, such being authoritative, establishing academic goals, and managing class time, also are relevant, increasing the sense of interest and usefulness for non-traditional students. Success, usefulness, and interest when considered in isolation are good predictors of students' GPA, explaining 17%, 10%, and 6% respectively of the variance. These findings offer more detailed insights to serve as reference for building faculty development programs, fostering faculty instructional methods and practice that meets the diverse student needs in higher education contexts. This study adds to the literature base about community college student success and how it is connected with students' perceptions of faculty behaviors and classroom motivators. Also, it contributes to the empirical work to the limited amount of research currently available on the Dominican higher education context.

In 2004, the Lumina Foundation for Education approved a generous grant to support validation research to explore and document the validity of the Community College Student Report (CCSR), add to the higher education field's understanding of student engagement, and help to identify research or institutional practices that require further attention. The study was conducted in three strands that linked Community College Survey of Student Engagement ("CCSSE") respondents with external data sources: (1) data from the Florida Department of Education; (2) data from the Achieving the Dream project; and (3) student record databases maintained at community colleges that have participated in the "CCSSE" survey and are either Hispanic-Serving Institutions or members of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU). All participating students had participated in the 2002, 2003, or 2004 administrations of the Community College Student Report, "CCSSE's" survey instrument. The pattern of results obtained from the Florida study broadly confirms positive relationships between the construct of student engagement as measured by "CCSSE" and community college outcomes. This Achieving the Dream study yielded mixed results. The most promising results were for academic achievement (cumulative GPA) and persistence (credit completion ratios and fall-to-fall retention). Less promising were the results when predicting course completions across developmental math, writing and reading, as well as college-level algebra and English. In the HSS study, the student engagement scales were predictors of both "CCSSE" self-reported outcomes and transcript-derived student outcomes. Overall, two student engagement scales--Academic Challenge and Support for Learners--were the most consistent predictors of student outcomes. Overall, results clearly demonstrate that in assessing the validity of the "CCSSE", the choice of student outcomes variables is very important. The analyses accounted for larger proportions of variance in cumulative GPA, total credit hours completed, and average credit hours than in first to second term persistence, first to third term persistence, and number of terms enrolled. Further, depending on the student outcome of interest, some "CCSSE" self-reported outcomes seemed to be good proxies for transcript-derived outcomes, specifically cumulative GPA and total credit hours earned. Overall, many of the "CCSSE" variables, as well as corresponding derived scales and factors, demonstrated solid relationships with both self-reported and transcript-derived student outcomes. The results of these studies point to the following overall conclusions: (1) There is strong support for the validity of the use of the CCSR as a measure of institutional processes and student behaviors that impact student outcomes; (2) The studies confirm a long tradition of research findings linking engagement to positive academic outcomes; (3) There is strong consistency in the relationship between engagement factors and outcome measures across the three studies; however, some outcomes have stronger relationships to engagement than others; and (4) The Support for Learners benchmark was consistently correlated with measures of persistence. Appended are: (1) Florida Community College System Validation Study Results; (2) Achieving the Dream Validation Study Results; (3) HSS Consortium Institutions Validation Study Results; (4) "CCSSE" Constructs; (5) Study Variables; and (6) Participating Institutions. (Contains 71 tables, 8 figures and 4 footnotes.) [For related report, "Student Engagement and Student Outcomes: Key Findings from "CCSSE" Validation Research," see ED529076.].

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the role of student-faculty interaction in retaining nontraditional community college students. There are a large and growing number of nontraditional students, especially at the community college level. Being labeled as nontraditional typically implies that there are multiple competitors for the time and resources of these students. Often, nontraditional students are less connected to their institutions, and exploring the relationships between faculty and student is a way to meet them where they are: in the classroom. As a result of the label nontraditional being difficult to define, the researcher used seven characteristics to provide a variety of contexts for the interviews. The study included 10 students age 24 or older who had completed 12-36 hours and attended a community college in the southeastern United States. They were asked to participate in 30-minute, one-on-one interviews regarding their interactions with faculty and the role of these interactions on their decisions to persist. Findings suggest that continuity decisions are largely based internally. However, 20% of the participants attributed their decisions to continue to interactions with their instructors. Attributes that contributed to making the instructors more approachable were openness, being oneself, and speaking to students as peers, rather than subordinates. Throughout the interviews, the participants admitted to seeing themselves differently than traditional students, but they did not feel like their instructors treated them differently. They assumed the responsibility of initiating contact, but they also appreciated initiation and acknowledgement by the instructors. Formal interaction did not appear to be as important as casual interaction. Even students who appear to be doing well can benefit from interaction, leading the researcher to conclude that interaction can be beneficial as both a preventative and a prescriptive measure. Educating both faculty and nontraditional students on the seemingly untapped value of interaction can help increase the retention rates at the community college level.