An exploratory study examining the relationship between student engagement and success between minority and non-minority nursing students
Forty years of educational research have revealed specific conditions that are essential for encouraging student persistence and academic achievement at post-secondary institutions. According to the well-known integration model, these conditions include expectations, support, assessment, feedback, and involvement. It is increasingly clear that student engagement is one of the most important conditions and has a significant impact on a student’s academic performance, satisfaction with overall college experience, and ultimately, overall success. However, researchers have not adequately studied this relationship among minority nursing students and overall student engagement. This is a problem because success rates are low among this population, contributing to a shortage of qualified minority nurses and to disparities in health care for minority patients. The purpose of this quantitative study has been to explore the relationship between student engagement activities and successful matriculation and to determine whether there is a difference in this between undergraduate minority and non-minority nursing students at a public higher education institution in the southeast United States. The study was based on an ex post facto design, and used data from students’ responses to the 2014 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE). Only one school provided the specific data needed for analysis. The final achieved sample size was 89. As a group, the NSSE benchmarks were found to significantly predict matriculation, but differences emerged when the coefficients were examined individually. Specifically, only the NSSE benchmarks Level of Academic Challenge and Active and Collaborative Learning were shown to be predictive of successful matriculation among both minority and non-minority students.
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