Decision-making Processes and Developmental Capacities of High-risk College Students
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High-risk students, those susceptible to academic failure or early withdrawal from college, face significant academic, economic, and personal challenges. They must make good, well-informed decisions to navigate these challenges and persist toward their educational goals. Supporting high-risk students in their decision making is an important means for educators to promote this population’s educational persistence and degree attainment.
This study explored the relationship between high-risk students’ decision-making processes and their developmental capacities to determine how students’ developmental capacities mediated their abilities to make good, well-informed decisions. Making well-informed decisions entails: gathering information from self and others, processing information by weighing expectations against one’s own interests, and making decisions that are consistent with one’s interests.
This study’s data came from the Wabash National Study (WNS). I analyzed longitudinal annual interviews from 2006-2009 with 22 high-risk participants from diverse US institutions. Of these, 18 participants identified as students of color, 17 held low high school GPAs, 16 were first-generation students, 15 had low ACT scores, and 13 were of low socioeconomic status. Data analysis entailed: 1) coding decision-making units in the 88 transcripts; 2) constructing decision-making profiles for the 22 participants that crystallized how students made decisions across time; 3) assessing participants’ developmental meaning making using four major categories of the WNS developmental continuum ranging from external to internal meaning making; and 4) analyzing each participant’s decision-making and developmental profiles to identify intersections between students’ decision-making processes and their developmental capacities.
Four decision-making patterns emerged from this analysis: 1. Reflective Ownership of Decision Making; 2. Movement to Reflective Ownership of Decision Making; 3. Movement to Recognizing the Need for Reflective Ownership of Decision Making; and, 4. Non-Reflective Ownership of Decision Making.
Participants using patterns one and two were most adept at well-informed decision making and reflected the most advanced developmental capacities over time. Their growing internal meaning making contrasted with the more external meaning making of those using patterns three and four who were less able to make well-informed decisions. Complex developmental capacities appear to be a necessary but insufficient condition, along with dissonance, support, and self-reflection capabilities, for well-informed decision making.
Document number: miami1339585548
Permalink: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1339585548
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