Predicting student success: a 10-year review using integrative review and meta-analysis

This article describes research funded by a Dean's New Investigator Award conducted to describe and evaluate nursing education research on predictors of retention, graduation, and National Council Licensure Examination success of baccalaureate-degree nursing students through an integrative review and meta-analysis of nursing research. The sample (n = 47) for the integrative review included all nursing research conducted within the years 1981 to 1990 related to predicting student success that had at least one nurse author and was published in US nursing journals or dissertations from a US university. Four studies from the corpus were appropriate to be treated meta-analytically. Ninety-four per cent of the studies were descriptive, used convenience samples, and most often identified quantitative measures, including American College Test, Scholastic Aptitude Test, and grade point average as predictor variables. Findings of the integrative review showed grade point averages in nursing and science courses as the greatest cognitive predictors of student success and parental education and age as the greatest demographic predictors. The meta-analysis portion of the study showed significant effectiveness of interventions used in the experimental studies. The Fail-Safe N (NFS) was used to assess the comprehensiveness and exhaustiveness of the literature searches. The NFS = 162 studies indicated that it would require 162 studies to overturn the conclusions.