Different Patterns of Student-Faculty Interaction In Research Universitiies: An Analysis by Student Gender, Race, SES, and First-Generation Status.Young K. Kim and Linda J. Sax. CSHE.10.07 (August 2007)
September 12 2007 – A new CSHE affiliated study examines the conditional effects of student-faculty interaction in a large research university system, based on various student characteristics including gender, race, and socio-economic and first-generation status.
Young K. Kim and Linda Sax utilized data from the 2006 University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES), a longitudinal census survey of all UC undergraduate students based at the Center for Studies in Higher Education. The study found that the impact of student-faculty interactions on student outcomes varies by student gender and race whereas it does not by student socio-economic or first-generation status.
“Assisting faculty in research…significantly and positively affects students’ college GPA and degree aspiration as well as their gains in critical thinking and communication regardless of students’ first-generation status,” note Kim and Sax.
They also note that characteristics such as gender and race shape the nature of the relationship between student-faculty interactions and developmental outcomes, albeit to a small degree. For example, their analysis shows that the relationship between assisting faculty in research and degree aspirations is significantly stronger for female students than male students. The authors also observe that the positive relationship between research experiences and GPA is significantly stronger for African American students relative to other racial groups of students.
“Each of these conditional effects suggests avenues for future research so that we can better understand whether the nature of the student-faculty interaction differs in certain ways by race or gender, thus producing dissimilar outcomes for different groups,” they conclude.
“Further, although conditional effects are observed occasionally across categories of gender and race, they are never revealed in terms of class or first-generation status. This suggests that the types of student-faculty interactions measured in this study have the same effect (or no effect) for students regardless of their social class or whether their parents had attended college.”
Young K. Kim is an institutional research analyst at Cerritos College; Linda J. Sax is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Organization Change at the UCLA and an associate of the Student Experience in the Research University Project based at CSHE.
For access to the study, see:
http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?s=1
CONTACT:
Young K. Kim or Linda J. Sax
ykim@cerritos.edu
lsax@ucla.edu
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