Tinto's Theoretical Perspective and Expectancy-Value Paradigm: A confrontation to explain freshmen's academic achievement

Abstract

For decades, success in postsecondary education has preoccupied psychological and educational researchers. In this respect, Tinto's student integration model (1982, 1997) is one of the most frequently cited models. Tinto proposed that students' background characteristics, initial intentions and aspirations towards college influence their academic and social integration, which in turn affect their persistence. Unfortunately, although this model is an integrative one, it does not take motivational variables such as students' self-efficacy (Bandura, 1997; Bong & Skaalvik, 2003) and students' subjective value of academic tasks (Eccles & Wigfield, 2002; Neuville, 2004) into account although their impact on learning has been widely demonstrated (Robbins, Lauver, Le, Davis, & Langley, 2004). The purpose of this study, conducted with 2637 first-year university students from all the Bachelor's degree programs of a Belgian university, is to compare, through structural equation models, the explanatory power of these two research traditions (students' integration, on the one hand, and a motivational paradigm, on the other hand) in predicting students' academic performance.