Research on college student retention has been conducted for over four decades. However, the majority of this research focuses on first-year college students, with very few studies focusing on the retention of college seniors. While only a small percentage of college seniors withdraw from their universities, the impact of not obtaining a…

Text mining presents an efficient means to access the comprehensive amount of data found in written records by converting words into numbers and using algorithms to detect relevant patterns. This article presents the fundamentals of text mining, including an overview of key concepts, prevalent methodologies in this work, and popular software…

Study programme withdrawal and student perseverance in post-secondary education are major challenges for post-secondary institutions, especially in view of the increasing difficulty of retaining the student clientele during the first year of university studies. To analyse the challenges students face in terms of learning strategies, we asked…

Nationally an estimated 41% of traditional students who begin seeking an undergraduate degree do not persist through degree attainment. Guided by Tinto's theory of student departure and the theory of social integration, the purpose of this study was to identify the reasons students withdrew from college prior to degree completion. A qualitative…

The purpose of this action research study was to measure the transactional distance of computer science students who participated in an online virtual community after completing a college preparation program. Using data and results generated from previous cycles of research I developed and moderated an online virtual community designed to lessen…

For many political science programs, research methods courses are a fundamental component of the recommended undergraduate curriculum. However, instructors and students often see these courses as the most challenging. This study explores when it is most appropriate for political science majors to enroll and pass a research methods course. The…

The purpose of this paper is to identify and explain the best practice of using "big data" reports to help distance learning administrators better understand their own programs and represent them to stakeholders. The authors examine five reports: (1) the number and percentage of graduates from the main campus who also take classes at the…

Tutoring is an important form of academic support for developmental education students. A comparison study was conducted to investigate the benefits of tutoring on the final grades for developmental English students who participated in tutoring versus those students who did not. The final grades for three consecutive semesters were analyzed to…

The use of merit criteria in awarding institutional aid has grown considerably and, some argue, is supplanting need as the central factor in awarding aid. Concurrently, the accountability movement in higher education has placed greater emphasis on retention and graduation as indicators of institutional success and quality. In this context, this…

The statistics education community continues to explore the differences in performance outcomes and in student attitudes between online and face-to-face delivery methods of statistics courses. In this quasi-experimental study student persistence, exam, quiz, and homework scores were compared between delivery methods, class status, and programs of…

This paper explores how expectations and post-secondary education (PSE) path disruption decisions are affected by a learning process that students experience once enrolled in a PSE program. An unexpected change in grades, between high school and first year PSE program, serves as an informative signal on how well their academic performance and…

Legitimate parental interests need to be distinguished from any putative rights parents "qua" parents may be said to possess. Parents have no right to insulate their children from conceptions of the good at variance with those of their own. Claims to the right to faith schools, private schools, home-schooling or to withdraw a child from…

A growing body of research confirms the financial and academic benefits that accrue to students whose faculty adopt open educational resources, or OER. While there are no content licensing costs associated with using OER, there are several real costs that must be incurred by an institution that chooses to support its faculty in adopting OER. The…

Student withdrawal has received increased attention in the context of an expanding and more diverse Higher Education (HE) student population. Students leave University for interconnected, multiple reasons. Some explanations are internal to the University and may include support mechanisms, assessment feedback and quality of teaching and others are…

This publication presents estimates of apprentice and trainee activity in Australia for the September quarter 2014. The figures in this publication are derived from the National Apprentice and Trainee Collection no. 82 (December 2014 estimates). There were 341,300 apprentices and trainees in-training as at 30 September 2014, a decrease of 18.4%…