Increasing student retention is one of the greatest challenges faced by community colleges. First-year community college students face a complex set of issues in grappling with their new academic roles and identities. Therefore, there is a need for effective retention efforts that support students during this time of transition. First-Year…

Community colleges are frequently an affordable, accessible entrance to a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and career, but the transition from a 2-year program to a 4-year institution can be tumultuous. In this mixed-methods study, we explore the experiences of transfer and prospective transfer students. Through…

The purpose of this descriptive study was to investigate course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) outcomes of community college students by looking at students' sense of project ownership, science self-efficacy, and science identity using an end of course survey. A total of 54 students, 41 females and 13 males, completed the survey.…

This qualitative case study explored self-efficacy and sense of belonging among African American males who participated in Men of Vision and their perception of community college. Ten students of the community college participated in the study through individual, in-depth interviews with the participants addressing three primary research…

The Early College program has a proven track record of academic success as noted through graduation rates, growth data, performance grades, and higher than statewide average test score averages. Research on the success of Early College methods is limited. This study analyzed the effects of a heterogeneously grouped Honors Math 1 classroom on…

Community colleges are open access post-secondary institutions that serve a variety of needs for diverse student populations. Community colleges are also often less resourced than four-year colleges, and the students who attend community colleges are more likely to be minoritized, from lower socioeconomic situations, and be less academically…

Students identified as first-generation often intersect with other factors such as enrollment in community colleges, low income, minority ethnic and/or race identities, low expectations of college-going, and less academic preparation (Cataldi et al., 2018; Redford & Mulvaney-Hoyer, 2017). In 2015, national completion rates in the United States…

This study investigated whether social identity (i.e., ethnic, science, or a combination of ethnic and science identities) and self-efficacy (i.e., general academic and science) predict academic persistence in STEM (i.e., graduating with a baccalaureate degree in a STEM or STEM-related discipline). The study drew on social cognitive theory (SCT,…

"Bee the CURE" is a Power-of-Place course-based undergraduate research experience (PoP-CUREs; Jaeger et al., 2024) that combines place-based education (Demarest, 2014; Gruenewald, 2014) with CUREs, emphasizing student "scientific" civic engagement where research is relevant to the community where the research is taking place.…

This action research project focused on teacher retention in Adult Education programs. The study was centered on new teachers in Adult Education, as defined as having less than three years of experience teaching in the field of Adult Education. The study concentrated on growing new teachers' senses of belonging, self-efficacy, and new teachers'…

This mixed-methods research study examines the Co-requisite model, an intervention in developmental mathematics, for its impact on student affect leading to success in math. This research hypothesized that students enrolled in the Co-requisite model experience positive changes in four affective variables: internal mathematical identity,…

Community colleges increasingly turn to various types of student success courses for their potential as high-impact practices to foster college completion. Despite commonly held assumptions of what characterizes these interventions, upon close inspection there is an un-scrutinized, circular confounding of their goals and means, which limits the…

Background: There is a critical need for evidence-based metacognition instruction models with an ease of implementation. Three issues involved in advancing the implementation and assessment of metacognitive interventions are: (i) the lack of an operational framework for the development of metacognition; (ii) metacognition instruction models that…

This dissertation is a phenomenological, multi-case study of 13 mathematically successful African American single mothers from two urban community colleges in Chicago. While a number of recent studies have focused on Black girls and women in K-12 and university contexts, the community college context remains understudied despite the presence of…

The United States faces shortages of professionals in science, technology, engineering, and math enterprises, which are complicated by underrepresented minorities facing systemic barriers to their educational and career success. Addressing this, we used social cognitive career theory and critical consciousness to create a program named Poder…