The Basics of Moving Students from Surviving to Thriving in College: The (missing) link between students’ daily interactions and academic success

Academic Summary Learning environments are characterized by educational vision, policies, and practices in the college's social and academic environment. Student experiences in these environments follow a range of social and intellectual exchanges with peers and teachers. How these exchanges affect learning depends on the nature and quality of these interactions (Swail, 2003). I started out with the premise that students are more motivated to engage in learning if they sense ownership of their social and intellectual involvement. Intuitively I found that using students' perspectives and ideas in shaping their participation makes their involvement more relevant to them. We referred to such experiences as meaningful involvement in learning. However, how to theoretically describe the qualities of meaningful involvement in learning and how they support or constrain learning and study success still needs to be clarified. The focus of this study is to find the (missing) link between daily interactions and study success. The central research question is: How do daily interactions with peers and teachers shape meaningful social and academic involvement to support study success? We conducted four studies to explore this question. The first two studies focus on the missing link between interactions and study success. By linking Tinto's interactional model of social and academic integration (Tinto, 1993) to concepts of meaningful involvement (Ryan & Deci, 2017), we aim to clarify key mechanisms in daily interactions supporting academic success. The third and fourth studies also explore two other avenues related to everyday interactions, namely how technology use in interactions may affect students' integration and sense of belonging on campus and how interactions may shape migrant and international students' inclusion on campus differently compared to students without migration background. All the studies are based on quantitative surveys conducted among college students in the Netherlands. The data for the first three studies were collected through online surveys from undergraduate students at universities of applied sciences. The fourth study used an existing data set (Belonging@VU) from students at a large research university. The findings of the four studies clearly show how students' daily interaction connects to academic success. Quality interactions support students' inclusion, meaningful involvement in learning, and academic success. However, not all students have equal opportunities to establish supportive relationships with peers and staff. Those whose values and practices match with peers and staff are more likely to find supportive relationships and ease their way into college social and intellectual communities, indicating their successful integration into the college community. However, students' integration is an essential first step for involvement in learning, but it does not guarantee study success. To succeed, their involvement in learning must be meaningful to them. It must support the three psychological needs relatedness, autonomy, and competence. This happens when their social interactions support genuine peer relationships (relatedness support), their intellectual exchanges with peers and staff trigger intrinsic involvement in learning (autonomy support), and recognize their intellectual abilities (competence support). Support of psychological needs grows students' autonomous motivation for learning, which indicates how meaningful their formal and informal interactions with peers (social integration) and teachers (academic integration) are to their development in college. But, for students to develop the skills they need to succeed, their formal interactions with peers and teachers must be autonomy and competence supportive. This will boost their sense of competency, making them confident of performing well academically. The increased confidence in their own abilities and autonomous motivation for learning makes students more likely to invest time and effort in developing effective learning strategies and achieve good results, which puts them in control of their learning and academic success.