Factors influencing grade point averages at a community college

The community college is a relatively recent addition to higher education. Its differences from the four-year college and university are considerable. It serves an older population (Cross, 1981) with a larger proportion of minority students than a four-year school (Plisko, 1985), and this population is in need of extensive remedial instruction (Cohen & Brawer, 1982; Cohen & Brawer, 1987). It can be argued that because of these differences, the community college has the most difficult task in post-secondary education. This task is further complicated by the fact that exactly how learning occurs at a community college is not well under-stood. How does one approach the task of educating students with limited interest in college, poor academic background, and who are enrolled in an institution that allows and even encourages sporadic attendance? An extensive literature on learning in postsecondary education suggests that factors such as student precollege traits, structural and organizational characteris-tics of institutions, institutional environment and the quality of student effort are all important for learning and retention (Pascarella, 1985). Moreover, the factors which influence learning at primary and secondary schools should also be examined to ascertain to what extent they are operative in the community college setting. This analysis will be accomplished more efficiently if a theoretical model which unifies the various factors influencing learning into a system is used to provide guidance. A theoretical model of educational productivity which has received substantial verification in primary and secondary settings has been proposed by Walberg (1984). Developed from research syntheses of nearly 3,000 educational studies, it posits that learning in its effective, behavioral and cognitive forms is causally influenced by nine factors in three areas. The structure of this model is delineated in Figure 1 and the factors are explained in Table 1