Community colleges expand access to higher education and play a key role in efforts to increase and diversify the future science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce. While community colleges increase access to higher education and millions of students attend them for some portion of their education, the experiences of…

Community colleges have an important, civic mission to serve the educational needs of the public. Often, community colleges will serve a disproportionate number of students belonging to ethnic minority groups and students of lower socioeconomic status (Cross & Atinde, 2015). Unfortunately, community college students experience lower levels of…

The community college, given its accessibility and affordability, has become the institution of choice for many African American men pursuing academic, vocational, and technical advancement. However, African American men attending community colleges are less likely to graduate and persist than their European American male and female peers. Limited…

Recent insights have underscored the role of context in cultivating intelligence mindsets' influence on students' academic outcomes. Psychological affordances of the social context may encourage an adaptive perspective (i.e., growth mindset). Expanding this novel area of investigation, we examined how students' sense of belonging, as an affordance…

This study explored self-efficacy in a sample of urban community college students. The main goal of the study was to determine levels of both general and academic self-efficacy in this population, consisting of first-generation, immigrant, and traditional students. Self-efficacy is an important psychological factor affecting academic motivation,…

The Bee the CURE is a novel course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE) that engages introductory biology students in DNA barcoding (DNA extraction, amplification, and bioinformatics) in partnership with the Tucson Bee Collaborative and the University of Arizona. The first iteration of this CURE taught at Pima Community College (PCC)…

Past scholarship and college enrollment trends suggest that the transfer process can be challenging, complicated, and even frustrating for many students seeking to obtain a baccalaureate degree. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to redirect this predominant narrative in order to offer a success-oriented narrative of the transfer student…

Completion rates for first-generation community college students continue to be of concern for higher education leaders. Only one out of five students at community colleges obtain their desired degree in three years or less and first-generation students persist less than non-first-generation students. This qualitative descriptive study explored…

The problem addressed in this study was the current low retention and graduation rates of Black males at community colleges nationwide. The purpose of this causal-comparative quantitative study was to determine the effect of the Black Male Initiative (BMI) on Black males' academic self-efficacy and academic achievement scores. Academic…

The problem addressed in this study was nontraditional community college students were at-risk of not completing their degrees. The purpose of this study was to explore the first-year completion strategies of nontraditional students at an urban Louisiana community college through the lens of their self-efficacy beliefs. I employed qualitative…

This study aimed to investigate the differences in learners' emotion, cognitive load, and cognitive performance among various scaffolding DGBLs, and the influences of emotion and cognitive load on cognitive performance when using DGBLs. Participants were 97 adult learners from some community college, randomly divided into the control group with 32…

Community college students represent a large percentage of U.S. undergraduates. In California, most of these students are low-income Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. However, despite the size of this student population, the mental health challenges these students face, and a need for alternatives to current campus mental health services,…

The problem addressed in this study was that first-generation Latino students underutilize academic support services, which affects college persistence, self-efficacy levels, and help-seeking behaviors. Although higher education institutions offer an array of student support, researchers have found many institutions find that underrepresented…

This study examined three influential factors of junior college students' learning engagement: (a) intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, (b) career decision-making self-efficacy (CDMSE), and (c) self-regulation. Participants included 206 students enrolled in the secretarial administration program in a junior college in South Korea. The primary…

As open-access institutions serving diverse student populations, community colleges are perfect settings for broadening participation in computing efforts in higher education. The very nature of open access, however, places students with a wide variety of previous experience in the same introductory computer science classroom, intimidating the…