First year college student’s persistence: the role of implicit andexplicit measures of attitudes
(2016) The Higher Education Conference — Location: Amsterdam (13.July.2016)
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160434NathalieRolandposter.pdf
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160434NathalieRolandposter.pdf
Restricted Access - Adobe PDF
- 1.17 MB
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- Abstract
- In Belgium, while the access rate to higher education is about 56% for secondary education students, rate of failure and dropouts of first year undergraduates is also quite high. 58.9% of the freshmen fail (ETNIC, 2011). Among these students, more than 25% give up (Neuville, Frenay, Noël & Wertz, 2013). At a European level, some studies have shown that more than 30% of students enrolled in higher education give up before getting their degree (OCDE, 2013). In this context, a lot of researchers have studied the determinants of academic persistence (Robbins et al., 2004). Recently, researchers have used a theoretical framework from social psychology, theory of planned behaviour, to better understand persistence (Roland, Frenay & Boudrenghien, 2016). This original approach go beyond traditional theories of persistence by proposing an integrative view of persistence. According to the theory of planned behaviour (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010), behaviour is determined by behavioural intention. Intention is defined as the estimated likelihood to commit in behaviour. This intention is underlain by 3 variables: the attitude toward the behaviour, the subjective norms, and the perceived behavioural control. An attitude can be defined as the evaluation we made toward behaviours. This evaluation can be positive or negative. The subjective norms are the perceived social pressure or influence and which can influence people to proceed behaviour. The perceived behavioural control is the perception a person has about the easiness or the difficulty to achieve a given behaviour. Results from studies which used this theoretical framework to better understand persistence showed that one of the best predictor of persistence is attitude (Houme, 2009; Roland, Frenay & Boudrenghien, 2016). Literature on attitudes emphasizes the distinction between explicit attitudes and implicit attitudes. Explicit attitudes represent a controlled and rational assessment about an attitudinal object whereas implicit attitudes are automatic and are not dictated by a rational and controlled thinking. Implicit attitudes generate automatic responses of a person to attitudinal objects and influence its interaction therewith (Rudman, Greenwald, Mellott & Schwartz, 1999). In the literature on academic persistence, researchers have only considered explicit attitudes, that are assessed through self-reported questionnaires. However, explicit measures have several limitations. First, they ask respondents a certain capacity for introspection that is not the case of implicit measures (Greenwald & Farnham, 2000). Then they are more sensitive to social desirability (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001). It seems that combining implicit and explicit measures would better predict behaviour (Fazio, 1990; McConnell & Leibold, 2001). We make the assumption that taking implicit attitude into account will represent a significant contribution to better understand the role of attitudes on persistence. To measure implicit attitudes, some tools were developed. The most known and used is the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998). This test assesses the strength of an association between a concept and an attribute considering the time with which participants respond in combined classification tasks. The aim of our study is to identify whether the implicit attitudes of students about persistence influence persistence beyond the influence of explicit attitudes but also whether the combined effect of these two types of attitude better predict persistence.
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Citations
Roland, N., Frenay, M., & Boudrenghien, G. (2016). First year college student’s persistence: the role of implicit andexplicit measures of attitudes. The Higher Education Conference, Amsterdam. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/181478