College enrollment has nearly doubled during the past five decades (Center for Education Statistics, 1993; McFarland et al., 2018). Of all first-time, full-time students pursuing a bachelor’s degree at 4-year institutions, 60% graduate within 6 years of enrollment (McFarland et al., 2018), and little improvement in graduation rates has been seen in the recent past (National Center for Education Statistics, 2017). Completing college is not only a function of institutional characteristics and program attributes, but also individual-level behaviors and experiences. Academic advisors play a large role in college student retention; however, no tools exist to facilitate an advisor’s ability to identify student barriers to academic success. Creation of such a tool requires a thorough understanding of what kinds of behaviors and experiences might influence academic performance.
At the individual level, academic self-efficacy, motivation, study skills, and habits are significant predictors of college retention and GPA even after adjustment for socioeconomic status and high school GPA (Robbins et al., 2004). Study and learning environments free of distractions and interruptions also predict academic success (Ellis, Daniels, & Jauregui, 2010; Froese et al., 2012; Plant, Ericsson, Hill, & Asberg, 2005). Behavioral health problems such as depression, anxiety, and poor sleep are reported to impede student success (American College Health Association, 2018; Becker et al., 2018). Becker et al. (2018) found that more than 60% of students meet criteria for poor sleep, which was associated with both anxiety and depression. Poor sleep, in turn, can impair cognitive performance (Beebe, 2011), which can have an impact on one’s ability to absorb and retain information in the classroom. Experiencing sexual assault is negatively associated with college student GPA (Jordan, Combs, & Smith, 2014). Sexual victimization, including child sexual abuse, adult rape, and attempted rape, predicted lower GPA in college even after adjustment for predictors of academic success (Baker et al., 2016). Child maltreatment and sexual victimization are also risk factors for dropping out of college (Baker et al., 2016; Duncan, 2000).
Although our understanding of the multiple predictors and impediments of academic success during college has grown substantially, a considerable evidence-to-practice gap remains. To our knowledge, academic assistance centers or advisors have no practical [End Page 103] tools to systematically and comprehensively measure these impediments to academic success. Although most academic assistance center staff engage in conversations with students about their satisfaction and progress, these conversations are largely unstructured. With this study we aimed (a) to document the frequency of a comprehensive set of possible barriers to academic success among a large sample of undergraduates, (b) to use iterated principal factor analysis to examine the underlying dimensionality of the barriers, and (c) to develop a psychometrically sound measure of these barriers based on the resulting factor analysis.”