This paper describes a course designed to introduce students to mathematical thinking and a variety of lower level mathematics topics using baseball while satisfying the goals of quantitative reasoning. We give suggestions for sources, topics, techniques, and examples so any mathematics teacher can design such a course to fit their needs. The…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Historically, much of what we know about human memory has been discovered in experiments using visual and verbal stimuli. In two experiments, participants demonstrated reliably high recognition for nonverbal liquids. In Experiment 1, participants showed high accuracy for recognizing tastes (bitter, salty, sour, sweet) over a 30-s delay in a…

The following study explores the landscape of grading systems utilised in higher education, focusing on the frequency of different types of assessment scales (including Straight Letter, Plus/Minus, and other alternative policies). Although numerous studies have explored the relationship between university grading system and student behaviour,…

Objective: Colleges have implemented policies to limit tobacco use on-campus; however, the off-campus environment is often overlooked in tobacco control efforts. We assessed availability, marketing, and promotion of cigarettes, snus, and traditional smokeless tobacco (SLT) in a sample of communities surrounding 11 college campuses in North…

Research has consistently demonstrated the wide-ranging benefits of student-led research, from increased student engagement to higher retention and graduation rates. Despite these calls to increase research opportunities for students, however, the availability of practical, easy-to-implement research frameworks in disciplinary-specific settings…

The benefits of in-class discussion, a form of active learning, are well-documented; in particular, discussions allow students the opportunity to learn from their peers. Yet students often treat discussions as 'down' or 'free' time. If students are not taking notes during discussion and reviewing those notes later on, they may not be learning much…

Problem was the community college recognized a decline in student retention rates from 2009 to 2012 in the School of Nursing. Purpose of this program evaluation was to evaluate a faculty advising program (FAP) in the School of Nursing at a community college in regard to students' satisfaction and retention. Evaluation period was from Fall 2012 to…

In this study we examined the effects of drawing on positive and negative affect, when negative mood induction is not used as has been done in prior research. There were 64 participants ranging in age from 18 to 24 who completed 1 of the following activities: drawing, writing, or sitting quietly for 10 min. Positive and negative affects were…

The purpose of this study was to determine the learning styles of Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) students and associate degree Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) students and identify any association between their learning styles and examine the association between gender and age by learning style. Participants included 337 DPT and PTA students…

This article details assignments and lessons created for and tested in research methods courses at two different universities, a large state school and a small liberal arts college. Each assignment or activity utilized scaffolding. Students were asked to push beyond their comfort zone while utilizing concrete and/or creative examples,…

Recently, studies have adopted fixed effects modeling to identify the returns to college. This method has the advantage over ordinary least squares estimates in that unobservable, individual-level characteristics that may bias the estimated returns are differenced out. But the method requires extensive longitudinal data and involves complex…

The growth of the public discourse on college completion and student debt has pushed policymakers and institutional leaders to implement a variety of policies aimed at incentivizing student completion. This article examines state-adopted excess credit hour (ECH) policies on student completion and median debt outcomes. Using a quasi-experimental…

With the goal of increasing the immediacy of the relationship between tenure-track professors and students, science departments in liberal arts colleges may try to arrange their curriculum so that students have the same professor in both the lecture and the lab section of introductory courses. While this goal seems laudable, empirical data are…

Evolutionary theory is central to the biological sciences, and to critical aspects of everyday life, and yet a significant proportion of Americans reject evolution. Our study sets out to examine the role of a second year college general education course in affecting students' acceptance of evolution. We report three years of data using the Measure…