The purpose of this study was to assess preservice teachers' comfort levels and familiarity with the teaching competencies embedded in the Texas Reading Academy curriculum. Participants in this study were eight clinical teachers involved in a pilot program with the Texas Education Agency (TEA), which was evaluating the feasibility of extending…

More than half of community college students nationwide intend to pursue a four-year degree; however, in Texas only one in four community college students transfer to four-year institutions successfully. Among students who do transfer to a Texas four-year institution, roughly 60 percent go on to graduate with a bachelor's degree. The result is…

This is the supplement to the report, "Texas Takes on Transfer Grants: Interim Impacts of the Texas Transfer Grant Pilot Program on Student Transfer." The Texas Transfer Grant Pilot Program was created by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to improve the transfer rates of students from two-year to four-year…

Transferring to a four-year institution is an important pathway to student success. Many students who enroll in community college intend to transfer to a four-year institution and subsequently earn a bachelor's degree. However, few students ultimately do, with low-income students transferring at lower rates than their peers. The Texas Transfer…

The purpose of this study was to explore the acceptance of mobile learning by students in a higher education setting. The unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) was extended to include hedonic motivation, operationalized as enjoyment, as well as social influence in a field study involving the adoption of iPad mobile devices.…

Following state legislation mandating corequisite support in lieu of remedial prerequisites for underprepared students, this article tells the story of a specific corequisite program piloted in South Texas. Our model transformed certain sections of our institution's first-year seminar into corequisite courses, which were paired with required…

Research indicates multi-section coordination improves the academic performance of students in STEM education. This paper describes the process of coordination in Precalculus, Calculus 1, and Calculus 2 courses undertaken by a large department that grew from the merger of two institutions through a pilot program and a project grant. Components…

Listeners evaluate well-delivered presentations more positively than those that are poorly delivered. In today's world, presenters often face challenging questions and objections from listeners during or after their presentations. Surprisingly, while there are a number of theoretical reasons to anticipate that how presenters respond to objections…

The course described here was designed especially for students enrolled in a collaborative program between Texas A&M University-Commerce and Konkuk University in South Korea. This course was created specifically for students who did not earn a qualifying score on a standardized placement exam required of all first-year students for enrollment…

This pilot study identifies some lexical aspects of the emerging writing skills in Spanish among receptive English/Spanish bilingual students with little or no exposure to formal study of the home language upon entering a Spanish Heritage Language Program at a large public university in the Southwestern United States. The 200+ essays analyzed in…

During the spring of 2010, the University of Houston Libraries Digital Services Department began an initiative to promote existing and upcoming collections in the University of Houston Digital Library and drive traffic to the online repository. Spurred by an OCLC report (De Rosa et al. 2005) that only two percent of college and university students…

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have had the ability to recruit African-American students since the 1860s by stressing a sense of inclusion and family through their mission statements and community outreach. There was little to no competition for African-American students from predominantly white institutions until integration…

In this article, the author shares the successful digitization effort of their library and demonstrates how they were able to expand their first digital collection. The author started working at James G. Gee Library when the director asked him to try digital collections and was asked to study an open source collection management program called…

Can success rates in a gateway course be improved by linking it to a college success course? This article describes the results of a pilot study that linked a first-year biology course that had a high drop-out and failure rate to a college success course that included study skills. The proposal to link courses came from the work of a faculty…

In a pilot study at El Centro College, an urban college in the Dallas County Community College District, students in a new-to-college educational framework class were offered an intervention intended to enhance the academic advising process. The intervention consisted of in-class career services advising, degree selection, degree planning, course…