Instructors may use low-cost, light-touch strategies to help students achieve optimal effort in demanding upper-level courses. The authors of this study exploit an intervention that provides a series of personalized feedback emails to students about their relative performance, which is tied to approving messages or tips that encourage improvement.…

Institutions of higher education are no strangers to crisis situations. From world wars to campus violence, colleges and universities across the United States have been both directly and indirectly affected by these crisis situations. However, in the early part of 2020, higher education was faced with a situation that transcended anything colleges…

Objective: To evaluate dietary and physical activity behavior in relation to loneliness among college students. Participants: Three-hundred forty-six incoming first-year students in Fall 2019 at a large state University in the US. Methods: Students completed online surveys in Fall 2019. Multivariable regression analyses were used to model…

Surprisingly, public universities in Virginia have larger diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bureaucracies than taxpayer-funded universities in any other state. George Mason University, which has a reputation as a right-of-center institution, has 7.4 DEI personnel per 100 tenure-track faculty, which is the highest of any public university in…

Background/Context: Several studies have investigated state political and economic factors that explain differences in levels of state appropriations for colleges and universities. Few studies have considered how stakeholder beliefs or taken-forgranted assumptions about various institutions may impact budgeting decisions for specific campuses. A…

Knowledge components (KCs) have many applications. In computing education, knowing the demonstration of specific KCs has been challenging. This paper introduces an entirely data-driven approach for: (1) discovering KCs; and (2) demonstrating KCs, using students' actual code submissions. Our system is based on two expected properties of KCs: (1)…

Objective: This study is the first to examine the influence of e-cigarette emission phrasing on perceived harm of secondhand exposure, and whether harm perception was associated with support for a tobacco-free campus policy. Participants: In the fall 2018 and spring 2019 semesters, 52 sections of a college English course (N = 791 students) were…

This article features a case study from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a large, public, urban, research university, in which challenges in administering financial aid for study abroad early in the COVID-19 pandemic led the Education Abroad and Student Financial Services teams to revisit practices and protocols. This article describes…

Academic developers play a key role in advancing instructor engagement in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) at their higher education institutions, but face structural and epistemological isolation. To leverage the knowledge and experience of developers leading SoTL efforts at their respective institutions, a group of academic…

The Division of Student Engagement and Enrollment Services at Old Dominion University (ODU) submitted a Request for Assistance to examine the challenges sophomore students face that can lead to attrition. A doctoral research team conducted a exploratory, sequential, mixed-methods study consisting of a literature review, focus groups and interviews…

The aim of the research is to comparatively investigate the opinions of students in doctoral education in the USA and Turkey about academic self-efficacy. The research used the basic qualitative research pattern from among qualitative research designs. The study group in the research comprised a total of 32 doctoral students with 16 from Turkey…

The author analyzes differences in student performance in an economics course offered face to face (F2F) and online over a period of four semesters at a comprehensive public university. Apart from mode of delivery, the characteristics of the course stayed nearly identical throughout. Exam and homework assignment scores are used as measures of…

In 2015, language faculty and administrators at the University of Virginia met to evaluate the needs of the more than 20 language programs offered on campus. A priority emerged for language-learning space better equipped to facilitate authentic interaction and communication. The committee conceived of an alternative language-learning space that…

This paper reports results from a mixed-methods study about how college students engage with news when questions of credibility and "fake news" abound in the U.S. Findings are based on 5,844 online survey responses, one open-ended survey question (N=1,252),and 37 follow-up telephone interviews with students enrolled at 11 U.S. colleges…

This case study describes the campus context and process for successfully including community engagement language into promotion and tenure policies at Virginia Commonwealth University, a high research, urban public university. The paper also describes barriers our campus faced during the promotion and tenure policy revision process, especially…