In January 2010, the General Assembly passed the Complete College Tennessee Act (CCTA), a comprehensive reform agenda that seeks to transform public higher education through changes in academic, fiscal and administrative policies at the state and institutional level. At the center of these reforms is the need for more Tennesseans to be better…

Assigning grades to student work, both during the academic term and as a summation of a student's mastery of subject matter, is a longstanding practice in all levels of education, from kindergarten through graduate and professional studies. Recently, a variety of factors have brought the criteria for assigning, and the resulting distribution of…

Distance education has dramatically increased the educational opportunities for underserved populations. This is evidenced by the fairly recent proliferation and success of online universities, and it is happening in spite of criticism of e-learning and online degree programs among academia and the popular press. As a result, many institutions,…

This study examined the gender-related differential predictive validity of five subscales of the Institutional Integration Scale (IIS) with regard to college student withdrawal. Differential functioning of the IIS across genders was assessed using an item response theory (IRT)-based framework of differential item and test functioning. The results…

Why do nursing and health studies graduate students who are enrolled in online programs decide to withdraw? The qualitative study reported in this paper investigated students' self-identified reasons for withdrawing from an online graduate program in nursing and health studies. The focus of the study was Athabasca Universities' Centre for Nursing…

The researcher examined the effects of online (OL) and face-to-face (FTF) course modality choice, as a motivational component, on students. self-selection of courses. A naturally occurring control and treatment group comparison design was employed. The participants were 435 college students (200 OL and 235 FTF) who attended an accredited private…

This paper investigates reasons Indigenous Australian medical students gave for leaving their courses prior to graduation. Indigenous students who had withdrawn or deferred from their medical courses were asked about the barriers and disincentives that had dissuaded them from graduating. Although the response rate to the questionnaire was very…

With over two thirds of high school graduates going on to pursue postsecondary options after high school and over one fourth at 4-year institutions and nearly half at 2-year schools never reaching their sophomore year, it is evident that the transition from high school to college is a broken one for many students. There has been a nationwide call…

Institutional researchers have undertaken many studies of student attrition in the past but mainly focusing on the quantitative dimensions. No doubt it is important for institutions to be aware of their attrition rates and how this may vary by demographic and other variables in order to develop strategies to minimise drop-out rates and thereby…

As much as it is eagerly anticipated, freshman year is often a time of confusion, disorientation, and even alienation for many students. One in four college freshmen will drop out before completing sophomore year. The reasons for this high level of withdrawal vary, but a report suggests that new students often feel overwhelmed and unprepared for…

Background: In recent years, withdrawal from initial teacher preparation (ITP) programmes, in England and elsewhere, has become a cause for concern amongst both ITP providers and policy-makers. Purpose: This paper seeks to enhance the presently underdeveloped evidence base on the causes of withdrawal from ITP and on the characteristics of student…

In 1997 the British Columbia Open University (BCOU) adopted a virtualization strategy based primarily on twinning off-line independent study distance education courses (textbook-based with study guide and telephone and e-mail tutor support) with alternate online versions (textbook-based with integrated conferencing and communications provided…

A serious difficulty in determining the importance of credit constraints in education arises because standard data sources do not provide a direct way of identifying which students are credit constrained. This has forced researchers to adopt a variety of indirect approaches. This paper differentiates itself from previous work by taking a direct…

The District conducts a "cross-sectional" analysis of student dropouts annually; it examines dropout rates among students enrolled in various grades at one point in time. A "longitudinal" analysis, also conducted annually, tracks a group of students in the same grade or cohort over a period of several years. Each method…

This paper reviews some of the ways in which student success can be predicted in conventional and distance education. Predicting such success is particularly important for new students where the pre-course start information available is sometimes slight and withdrawal often occurs very early in a course. It suggests that, in such cases,…