Content Validation of the Community College Student Success Program Inventory

Abstract

This study reports on the content validation of the Community College Student Success Program Inventory (CCSSPI), a structured interview protocol for program personnel, designed to serve as a tool for researchers and practitioners alike to account for critical features of various types of student success programs in detailed and comparable ways across multiple sites. In all, 20 subject matter experts (SMEs) rated the relevancy and clarity of each item to ascertain essential program features. Content validity index (CVI) and scale-level index scores (S-CVI) were calculated. Results showed high to moderately high validity for items related to course goals, logistics, skills-focused curricular items, and academic and student services. Other contingent facets-collaborative and contextualized learning, co-curricular and community activities, ancillary instruction, and instructor role-were rated as less valid, depending on program goals. The instrument is recommended for use in multisite qualitative or mixed-methods research and institutional improvement. The Community College Student Success Program Inventory

What Works: Learning Outcomes Due to Design Variations in Community College Student Success Courses

“…At the course level, structured interviews with course instructors elicited information regarding the course goals and themes; logistic information such as duration and intensity; whether the course was required of participants; the presence and prominence of 29 curricular features in five categories according to the typology of Hatch and Bohlig (2016); and demographic information regarding the instructor and his or her relation to the course. The questionnaire for the interviews, entitled the Community College Student Success Program Inventory (CCSSPI), was developed on the basis of three prior studies and subjected to a content validity study, as summarized in Hatch, Mardock-Uman, and Nelson (2018). The aim of the CCSSPI is to provide a systematic yet flexible way to inventory the programmatic and curricular features of various types of student success program interventions in comparable ways.…”

The Case for the Practice Brief in Community College Studies: Writing to Bridge Research and Practice

“…In some journals, a practice brief might in fact respond to a call for papers for a shorter-length "exchange" article or "research in brief." However, in practice in today's higher education journals such entries are usually empirical pieces of larger studies, such as a content validation (e.g., Hatch, Mardock-Uman, Nelson, 2018;Wood, Reid, Harris, Xiong, 2016) or methodological notes (e.g. Campbell, 2017), to name two examples.…”