Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Student retention is a problem that continues to plaque higher education institutions whose ultimate goal is to graduate students. The reported national student retention average in 2006 was between 58 and 71.6 percent, depending on to which statistics you refer. The importance for the academic community is that “the loss of students returning to campus for another year usually results in greater financial loss and a lower graduation rate for the institution, and might also affect the way that stakeholders, legislators, parents, and students view the institution” (Lau, 2003).
In order to combat low student retention rates, many have initiated a variety of programs and strategic measures to increase students’ likelihood to complete their education. These initiatives can be found in the form of committees designated to conduct research and subsequently implement programs, colleges hiring outside consultants to assist with retention strategies, and the implementation of “student success” courses into the existing curriculum. Additional measures at the campus level may include: retention merit initiatives, student satisfaction and instructor surveys, and re-entry campaigns to target withdrawn students.
According to Tinto (2002), “Most institutions, in my view, have not taken student retention seriously. They have done little to change the way they organize their activities, done little to alter the student experience, and therefore done little to address the deeper roots of student attrition”. The author faults the institutions that attempt to combat the issue by simply adding a course that is “marginal to the academic life of the institution”. While he does not directly address using personality or learning styles as a tool to combat student attrition, he states that, “Institutions that are successful in building settings that educate their students, all students, not just some, are institutions that are successful in retaining their students”.
This research will provide an in depth look at existing personality type and retention data, an examination of communication incidents as reported by both “graduates” and “withdrawn” students, and recommendations for implementing personality-based communication techniques in the classroom in an effort to enhance overall student satisfaction. Considering the explosive growth of web-based distance education courses and program offerings, additional considerations will be made to address the online learning environment and its unique communicative needs. It is my assertion that both student retention and overall satisfaction can be enhanced with knowledge of existing personality and learning types of both students and teachers and a modification of the communication processes to fit students’ varying styles and communicative needs.
By conducting a very basic level of research on personality types, one can find an abundance of information, each assessment claiming to be more effective than the others. Several textbooks, websites, and employer profiling systems guide users to various paper or web based tests which solicit descriptors of one’s own behavior, characteristics, and tendencies. First published in 1962, one widely recognized psychometric questionnaire used frequently in career counseling is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Respondents are asked to answer 93 forced-choice questions based on their preference of two words or short statements. The results are given in the form of a four letter abbreviation, each letter representing one of their four type preferences based on four dichotomies. The four dichotomies are Extraversion vs. Introversion, Sensing vs. Intuition, Thinking vs. Feeling, and Judging vs. Perceiving. “The MBTI suggests general areas of life, or careers, in which persons are most apt to be interested, motivated, and successful” (Van, 1992, p. 20). As described by John (1990), “The five-factor model is a descriptive framework within which all the important individual differences in personality are subsumed under five global traits” (as quoted in Wolfe & Johnson, 1995, p. 178). The Five Factor Model identifies the “Big Five” personality traits of its respondents and presents them as percentile scores. Measures are comprised of either self-descriptive sentences or adjectives. The Big Five factors are as follows: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. “A personality taxonomy such as the “16-factor model developed by Cattell (1965), posits that there are 16 primary personality factors” (Lidy & Kahn, 2006, p. 124). Through extensive research on the subject, and self assessing with a variety of these tests, the model I have chosen to highlight here is the DiSC personality assessment.
The tool measures personality types based on a word association that offers a number of descriptors and asks participants to select the one that is “most like” and “least like” them. The in-depth profile then provides a bar graph measure of each of the four dimensions and a “classical pattern” to the participants. The four dimensions of the assessment are as follows: D (Dominant), i (Influencer), S (Steadiness), C (Conscientiousness).
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:IUPUI/oai:scholarworks.iupui.edu:1805/2134 |
| Date | 03 May 2010 |
| Creators | Barnett, Melissa G. |
| Contributors | Goering, Elizabeth, Sandwina, Ronald M., White-Mills, Kim |
| Source Sets | Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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