Understand first year college students persistence: The planned behaviour theory in perspective

Roland, Nathalie [UCL] Frenay, Mariane [UCL] Boudrenghien, Gentiane [UCL]

Dropout rates within first year is quite high in French Belgian universities. More than 14% of students give up between June and September and 7% doesn’t register for the exams (Galand, Neuville & Frenay, 2005). The aim of our research is to better understand why some students persist whereas others give up. While there have been many researches in this area, several limitations may be pointed out (Richardson, Abraham & Bond, 2012, Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005): results obtained by these studies are often contradictory; most research didn’t analyse jointly the determinants of persistence in an integrative model; many approaches used settle persistence in a deterministic perspective. The planned behaviour theory (PBT) could be a theoretical framework (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010) that may overcome some of the current limitations, and that is well established in other domains than higher education. Through this theory, persistence is considered as behaviour that results from a chain of beliefs and psychological processes. Therefore, we led a preliminary study with 203 first year college students to elicit the more salient beliefs about persistence. Once these salient beliefs were selected, we tested validity and reliability of items developed to capture these beliefs with a new cohort of 152 first year college students. Based on these first analyses, we are now finalising a standard questionnaire that will be used in further studies and that will test the relevance of the PBT in our context.