Student Services support, including learning skills assistance, can be integral in empowering learners. First-year students are expected to be self-directed in their learning, yet may have neither been challenged nor experienced negative consequences for a lack of perseverance. Academic skills professionals can be partners with teaching faculty in…

In 2007, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges launched the Student Achievement Initiative (SAI), a system-wide policy to reward colleges for improvements in student achievement. Under the SAI, since 2009, the state has awarded some funds based on how much colleges have increased student achievement relative to their own…

Pressures to increase accountability in basic skills education have encouraged policy makers and postsecondary institutions to focus on student achievement. Using the Washington State Student Achievement Initiative Database and two consecutive years of data, this study examines the academic progress of basic skills students at one community…

Students live in an information and knowledge management economy in which the dissemination and analysis of information requires intellectual, technical and interpersonal skills. As a direct response to higher education's challenge to produce more engineers, scientists, and business professionals, universities have increased the numbers of…

The purpose of this study was to measure the comprehension of basic mathematical skills of students enrolled in statistics classes at a large regional university, and to determine if the scores earned on a basic math skills test are useful in forecasting student performance in these statistics classes, and to determine if students' basic math…

Community colleges play an important role in the U.S. economy, providing access to higher education for low-income young people, a path to higher-earning employment for low-income workers, and a supply of well-trained employees for local industry. In order to remain competitive with other major economies, however, the U.S. must sharply increase…

This study presents an investigation of information literacy as defined by the ETS iSkills™ assessment and by the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) Information Literacy Scale (ILS). As two related but distinct measures, both iSkills and the ILS were used with undergraduate students at NJIT during the spring 2006 semester. Undergraduate…

The purpose of this paper is to describe basic skills students in relation to their participation in basic skills and their success in transitioning to college-level classes, and the momentum they gain towards college success from this participation. In the period of time covered by the data used for this analysis, 24 colleges offered I-BEST…