“I Thought About Solutions”: How Students’ Narratives of Relational Conflict, Grit, and Agency Predict Academic Performance within Community College

Abstract

Objective. Theorists have posited that community college students’ socio-academic integrative relationships with other students, college staff, and instructors, as well as their sense of college-related aspiration, mindset, grit, and agency, may impact their academic success. When community college students narrate (i.e., create stories that help them understand, investigate, and communicate) about higher education, they may reflect upon such relational and internal experiences in ways that signal later academic performance. This study reviews how students narrate to reflect upon their relational and internal experiences within a community college. It then connects students’ narrative explorations to their year-end grade point average (GPA). Method. Script analysis was used to explore how 104 ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse community college students reflected on their best and worst college experiences using different scripts, which are collective and shared ways of knowing that people use to organize their understandings of recounted experiences. Multiple regression models linked students’ narrative scripts to their year-end GPA. Results. Students narrated on their college lives using a variety of different scripts. When narrating about their worst experiences, students’ focus on socio-academic relational conflicts and on their grit and agency while coping with college-related difficulties predicted their having a higher year-end GPA. Conclusion. In a partial confirmation of Wang’s and Deil-Amen’s theoretical expectations, students’ narrative expressions of grit and agency, as well as their relational experiences and conflicts with other students, instructors, and staff at college, predicted their academic success.