April 20, 2016
CWID Data Note 7: Transfer Research Gaps
Future research on community college transfer needs to explore access and success among underserved populations, partnerships between two- and four-year institutions and the impact of policy. These recommendations emerged from a meeting of 18 transfer research scholars at the American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2016 meeting.
The D.C. meeting hosted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation convened researchers with a wide range of expertise. A primary outcome and deliverable of this meeting was a set of research questions to guide future inquiry for transfer research. To facilitate development of these questions, meeting participants engaged in small group discussions associated with three domains of research. The domains and associated questions are outlined below.
Access and Success for Students of Color and Underserved Students
Further research is needed to understand the extent to which student participation and success in the transfer process varies by race/ethnic background, income, and other defining characteristics. The researchers in this small group voiced concerns about inequities in the STEM transfer process for diverse student groups, the racial transfer gap, transfer culture, and other indicators of difference.
The resulting research questions included in this domain explore how enrollment patterns are related to student characteristics, whether existing mechanisms can transfer growth, how student identity intersects with the process, and the role of self-identification.
Transfer Function and Pathways
Research in this area would improve the understanding of core transfer and articulation functions, and the ways students decide, progress, and attain outcomes from their movement through higher education. The research questions posed by this group were focused on the student decision-making process, external factors that influence transfer decisions, community college structure, and incentives for four-year institutions to develop stronger pathways.
Transfer Policy
Understanding the state, system, and institutional policies that facilitate transfer access and success is needed to bring about systemic change. The roles that state legislators and other policy leaders play in adopting and implementing effective transfer policy needs greater attention, as does research on institutional incentives for transfer, data capacity for measuring transfer, and accountability structures.
The research questions posed by this small group focus on the drivers of policy change, the role of legislators, the incentives used to advance transfer and articulation, and how state-level policies are implemented.
For the full list of research questions in each domain and more background on the scholar meeting, download the full PDF below.