During the last five years a group of universities in Chile started to implement admissions programs that consider the achievement of students in context of the educational opportunities they had, thus reducing reliance on the national college entrance exam. This study explores the program theories in a sample of these programs and their effects…

Colleges and universities work hard to create environments that encourage student learning, and they develop grading policies, in part, to motivate their students to perform well. Grades provide two kinds of information about a student's abilities and learned knowledge: "internal" information that informs the students themselves about the…

Prompted by some disturbing trends of reducing enrollment among females and minorities in an earlier study (Borman, Workman, Miller & Micceri, 2006), this study, using data from over 600,000 Florida State University System (SUS) applicants, demonstrates empirically how a trend that began during World War II helps ensure that males and…

This study asked college students to report their current institutional grade point average (GPA) and grant permission for the researcher to examine the official records with the understanding that some had questioned the accuracy of such self-reported GPA. The relationship between self-report and actual GPA was moderately powerful, but…

The American College Testing (ACT) Program's Collegiate Assessment of Academic Proficiency (CAAP) was chosen as Arkansas'"rising junior exam" to measure learning in the general education curriculum. A study was conducted with a group of 124 college students to determine the predictability of CAAP scores based on ACT scores and cumulative…

Data from a 1974 national survey of 134 colleges was presented to verify that grade point averages had increased.404 points from 1965 to 1973. Approximately two-thirds of the increase occurred since 1968 and the 1968 to 1970 period showed the highest average annual increments. Essentially, the same pattern and magnitude of change was revealed for…

Assessed the accuracy of academic gender stereotypes by asking 265 college students to estimate the percentage of male and female students and their grade point averages (GPAs) and comparing these to the actual percentage of male and female students and GPAs. Results show the inaccuracies of academic gender stereotypes. (SLD)

This study examined the perception that individuals who enter the teaching profession are less academically competent than are those who enter other fields of study. The study investigated differences in students' grade point averages (GPAs) and differences between GPAs earned in English, mathematics, social studies, and science by teacher…

Critical thinking has been conceptualized as a two-factor system in which critical thinking ability and critical thinking disposition combine to determine actual thinking performance. The present study used confirmatory factor analysis to investigate such a two-factor model empirically. One hundred ninety-eight Purdue University undergraduates…

During the past 15 years, considerable attention has been given to a conspicuous longitudinal change in grading patterns in higher education. Commonly referred to as "grade inflation," the phenomenon has been perceived by some as seriously weakening the meaning of grades but by others as reflecting a positive tendency for students to…

This study was conducted to determine the accuracy of the commonly cited claims that teacher certification graduates are inferior to noncertification graduates in terms of entrance and exit criteria. Popular literature and conventional wisdom have apparently influenced state legislatures to enact legislation which places limits on the professional…

The Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) Models, often referred to as Box-Jenkins models, are regression methods for analyzing sequential dependent observations with large amounts of data. The Box-Jenkins approach, a three-stage procedure consisting of identification, estimation and diagnosis, was used to select the most appropriate…

Previous studies have shown that students who intend to major in education have low SAT and ACT scores. Further, among those students who intended to major, those who do major have even lower average scores. This study also shows that those students who intend to major in education have lower average high school and college grade point averages.…

Piaget has suggested formal operations, as measured by his tasks, may be related specifically to physics-type problem solving and that other hypothetico-deductive thinking processes develop in adults in other specializations. The present follow-up study examined the relationship between formal versus concrete operational thinking as measured by…

The draft report describes a study to identify the cognitive skills related to academic performance in five career areas and 19 academic majors at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf and to compare skill profile differences among groups of students (N=1,047) in the various career areas and academic majors. Results of a battery of tests…