Author : Victoria Vetro
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 387 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (131 download)
Book Synopsis A Qualitative Exploration of First-generation Students' Mattering and Persistence Experiences at a Suburban Community College by : Victoria Vetro
Download or read book A Qualitative Exploration of First-generation Students' Mattering and Persistence Experiences at a Suburban Community College written by Victoria Vetro and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One subset of underrepresented college students is first-generation students, whose parents or legal guardians did not attend college, which may make difficult their transition into college (Cataldi et al., 2018). Mattering, specifically feeling the attention, dependence, and importance of others, forestalls marginality, discourages self-isolation, and broadens academic and social success for students (Schlossberg, 1989). Because first-generation students do not take to their college experience an inherited sense of cultural and social capital that their non-first-generation peers do, other researchers argued that first-generation students are often limited from feeling as if they matter on campus (Katrevich & Arguete, 2017). According to Cataldi et al. (2018), students whose parents have not attended college face significant challenges accessing postsecondary education and then persisting once they do enroll. These challenges can explain the inequities that historically underrepresented students, such as first-generation students, face during their college experiences, challenges currently exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the researcher interviewed eleven first-generation students at a midsized, suburban community college in the Northeast to discover how their sense of mattering with professors, peers, and other college agents in the midst of a pandemic contributed to their persistence. Through narrative re-storying of the students' lived experiences, the researcher uncovered four overarching themes, including the students' resilience, self-determination, self-efficacy, and burden of being first that informed the students' sense of mattering so that they were determined to complete their degrees even in the midst of a most unprecedented and chaotic time.