A Comparative Analysis of Student Engagement between Community College Students

For years, community college research has focused on student engagement in an effort to improve student academic performance, retention, and graduation completion rates. While the positive effects of student engagement at both the community college and 4-year university levels have been consistently supported by previous research, there has been very limited research that has focused exclusively on the impact of student engagement in the growing subset of Workforce, now referred to as Career and Technical Education students. Since 2003, community colleges have employed the Community College Student Report to gather data from students on several variables positively correlated with increased student engagement levels. The purpose of this causal- comparative study is to compare student engagement levels between Academic and Career and Technical Education students enrolled in a college district in Texas as reported on the Community College Student Report which covers five major benchmark areas. If a difference existed, the original contention that Career and Technical Education students\u27 inputs would differ could indicate the need for more focused attention on this group in the normal administration of the survey. The original expectation was that there would be statistically significant differences in responses between groups; however, the results indicated unremarkable differences in student engagement levels between the two groups in all five benchmark areas and reflected only slight differences in any of the subscales