Making a Way to Success: Self-Authorship and Academic Achievement of First-Year African American Students at Historically Black Colleges

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to estimate the relationship between academic achievement in college, as defined by first-year grade point average (GPA), and self-authorship among African American first-year students at an HBCU ( N = 140), using hierarchical linear regression techniques. A single research question guided this investigation: What is the relationship between measures of self-authorship and the academic achievement of African American collegians at HBCUs, controlling for potentially confounding differences? Findings reveal that self-authorship predicts first-year GPA above and beyond background characteristics and traditional measures of academic preparation for college (e.g., high school GPA, ACT/SAT); the final regression model accounts for approximately 58% of the variance in the dependent variable.