Study utilizing participatory action research to pursue retained two-year college students' experiences as the basis for action and change

Abstract

Oklahoma State University -- Oklahoma City's (OSU-OKC) student retention rate mirrors the two-year system's national retention metric in that fewer than half of all first-time students return to the campus for their second fall semester (OSU-OKC, 2014; AACC, 2012). OSU-OKC's stagnant rate of retention persists, as it does on similar campuses, despite administrative access to the results of nationally-normed student engagement surveys, and two-year college best practices; and access to new knowledge added, annually, to the body of retention literature (Fike & Fike, 2008). In an effort to improve OSU-OKC's rate of student retention, I, as a campus administrator, utilized the participatory action research (AR) methodology to engage OSU-OKC's retained students, as collaborators, in work to collect and help analyze peer experiences to develop recommendations to improve students' retention. I did not find any example in the research literature in which a researcher, also serving as a campus administrator, deployed AR methodology to explore retained students' college-going lived realities in an explicit effort to improve student retention on a two-year campus.