Novel Perspectives on Adversity Exposure, Stress Responding, and Academic Retention Among First- and Continuing-Generation Students

Abstract

First-generation college students are less likely to complete their degrees than continuing-generation students, in part due to experiences of educational and socioeconomic adversity. Accounting for adversity and its downstream implications is likely to suggest new interventions that promote resilience and retention of these students. We propose a novel model in which the influence of adversity on long term academic outcomes acts through indicators of stress responding, then through academic avoidance behaviors. The strength of this pathway depends upon both a cognitive processing characteristic that affects stress responding—trait rumination—and levels of enacted family support during college. This perspective suggests specific targets for intervention that include decreasing levels of rumination, increasing levels of family support, and decreasing academic avoidance behaviors for all students, but might be particularly relevant to first-generation students.

Emerging adults’ digital technology engagement and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic

“…It is perhaps not surprising that those emerging adults who were experiencing more anxiety also tended to perceive their screen time as having increased – whether this be because they have been primed by the media and their parents to see screen time as harmful and perhaps to blame for their mental health symptoms ( Kamenetz, 2021 ) or because of a more objective link between pandemic-screen time increases and anxiety (though the lack of robust associations across other more objective indicators would suggest not). Given that, amidst the pandemic in Fall 2020, much of college education was occurring on screens, it may be that the observed association between objectively-recorded education-related screen time and anhedonic depression is reflective of well-established links between the amotivation characteristic of anhedonia and low academic engagement ( Fletcher et al, 2022 ); that is, those students who were experiencing anhedonia were probably the least likely to be signing on to their courses’ learning management systems to check homework or watch lecture videos. It must be noted, though, that neither of these associations stood up to corrections for multiple comparisons, suggesting that they are possibly spurious and should be interpreted only with caution.…”

Student Engagement in Fully Online Learning Environment Impact on the Academic Retention

“…observed variables exist in the equation independently of latent variables. SEM is suitable for explaining structural models of potential relationships between multiple explanatory variables and between multiple explanatory variables and latent variables, and can help researchers reveal and explain these potential relationships [8][9].…”