The purpose of this study was to explore the perceptions of developmental students enrolled in a developmental reading course in a community college setting. A reading course questionnaire and interest/attitude inventory was completed by the students. In addition, individual interview were conducted. Eight students participated in the study that…

Conference proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference on the Teaching of Psychology: Ideas and Innovations, sponsored by the Psychology Department of the State University of New York at Farmingdale. The conference theme for 2011 was: The Future of the Undergraduate Psychology Major: New Directions in an Evolving Educational Climate. The Conference…

This research brief provides highlights from the full report (published separately) that describes the ninth annual High School Exit Survey in AISD. The survey was administered online to seniors in every AISD high school during Spring 2011. In total, 3,793 seniors completed the survey, for an adjusted response rate of 87.3 percent.

This study explores an English as a Second Language (ESL) Introduction to Psychology Learning Community (ESL-IPLC) as an approach to retaining ESL students in a community college. Retention is a problem in all higher education settings, but is especially important for community colleges because of their "open door" policy. Community colleges…

Several years ago, leaders at Vanguard-Sentinel Career Centers, located in northwestern Ohio, began looking at the issue of student motivation. They were concerned that some students, even in their career-based programs, were falling through the cracks. For a variety of reasons, these students were not successful in the traditional high school…

This article focuses on how a worker's relationship with either a place of work or employer--or with what the skilled worker does very well--contributes to very different forms of work identity. Work identity that reflects a determination on the employee's part to commit to the values of the work group is vocational identity, which is important…

In higher education, the two-year community college serves many roles. Probably the most well-known roles include serving underrepresented populations--those students who are the first in their families to attend college, those whose families don't have the financial means to send their children to a four-year college, and/or those whose academic…

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students' essays. To study the relationship between writing-faculty workload and comments that faculty write on students' essays, the author sent an eleven-question survey to 30 English…

Background/Context: Twenty percent of first-year students in public 4-year institutions and 42% of first-year students in public 2-year institutions in the United States enroll in remedial courses. Yet despite widespread remediation across U.S. colleges and universities, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about how remedial courses develop…

This book is organized into nine chapters. First the authors provide a historical overview of historically black colleges or universities (HBCUs), examining their founding as well as the role of African Americans, missionaries, and industrial philanthropists in their development. They also look at how these institutions have changed over time,…

A qualitative, hermeneutic phenomenological study conducted through interviews with 20 non-traditional (NT) Hispanic/Latino female part-time community college students and located at an urban community college in southern New Jersey explored for factors of persistence and discontinuation. Six themes emerged. Theme 1: Institutional persistence…

The purpose of this study was to analyze the spring 2008 Community College Survey of Student Engagement (CCSSE) results from a community college located in Southeast Texas to determine what relationship student engagement had to student persistence and academic performance and if that relationship differed by race, ethnicity, or academic program.…

The ongoing integration of instructional technology within community colleges has occurred for a variety of reasons. First, community colleges have implemented technology-based models to make operations more efficient and cost-effective. Second, instructional technology has been used to expand student markets through alternative course-delivery…

The purpose of this study is to determine how students, staff, faculty, and administrators view campus diversity and multicultural issues and activities. The findings reveal that students, faculty, and administrators view the campus differently in terms of racial and social climate. In addition, faculty and students differ about how diversity and…

Changing an institution's culture so that everyone at the college is focused wholeheartedly on learning is neither easy nor insignificant, and it cannot occur overnight. For some colleges, it means introducing a whole new way of life. The evolution to an institutional environment that both supports student learning and measures learning outcomes…