This paper proposes and validates a short and simple Expectancy-Value-Cost scale, called EVC Light. The scale measures the motivation of students in computing courses, allowing the easy and weekly application across a course. One of the factors related directly to the high rate of failure and dropout in computing courses is student motivation.…

This dissertation consists of three chapters on the industrial organization of higher education. Chapter 1 studies the impacts of mergers and acquisitions on students' outcomes. We explore a series of acquisitions of private higher education institutions in Brazil to conduct an ex-post analysis of the effects of mergers. Using detailed…

We performed a controlled experiment comparing a C and a Python Introductory Programming course. Three faculty members at University of Campinas, Brazil, taught the same CS1 course for the same majors in two different semesters, one version in Python and one in C, with a total of 391 students involved in the experiment. We measured the dropout…

With technological advances, distance education has been frequently discussed in recent years. The learning environments used in this course usually generates a great deal of data because of the large number of students and the various tasks involving their interaction. In order to facilitate the analysis of the data, the authors researched to…

Predicting school dropout rates is an important issue for the smooth execution of an educational system. This problem is solved by classifying students into two classes using educational activities related statistical datasets. One of the classes must identify the students who have the tendency to persist. The other class must identify the…

Adaptive curriculum sequencing (ACS) is still a challenge in the adaptive learning field. ACS is a NP-hard problem especially considering the several constraints of the student and the learning material when selecting a sequence from repositories where several sequences could be chosen. Therefore, this has stimulated several researchers to use…

The teaching-learning methodology adopted in the Introduction to Computer Science classes may be a process that makes it difficult to understand the principles of programming language for undergraduate students in Computer Science and related areas, generating high failure and course drop out rates. This paper presents an analysis of the results…

With increasing access to Brazilian higher education comes increasing dropout rates in both licentiate and non-licentiate undergraduate programs. This paper reports on a comparative study of licentiate and non-licentiate undergraduate programs that enrolled students who either had or did not have a University Program for All (ProUni) scholarship.…

This dissertation encompasses three chapters that study the Brazilian higher educational system and determines the barriers to acquiring higher education in the country. Below are the individual abstracts for each chapter. Chapter 1: "Rural and urban schools' performance in Brazil and its impact on access to higher education". Recent…