Background/Context: As students increasingly enroll in online postsecondary courses, instructors and students need new strategies to maintain engagement, motivation, and sense of belonging to have academic success, particularly for historically disadvantaged students. This study focuses on improving student success in online postsecondary STEM…

Community colleges provide broad access to a college degree due to their less expensive tuition, greater course time offerings, and more open admission policies compared to four-year universities as reported (Juszkiewicz, 2015). These institutions have great potential to diversify who chooses STEM, such as engineering. Such diverse representation…

This study identifies the best online teaching practices to benefit first-year visual arts students, notably to include instructor-created videos. Such instructor-created videos provide a firm foundation for these students to succeed in their first year of college. The introduction of Web 2.0, focusing on user-generated content, has shown…

Recent international studies have found that teachers' attitudes, biased against historically marginalized groups, predict lower student achievement in mathematics (e.g., van den Bergh et al., 2010). It is not clear, however, if or how teachers' racial attitudes affect their evaluation of students' mathematical thinking to produce these effects.…

This research conducted an exploratory study of online students' perceptions of forms of support which might promote their retention and success. Data came from interviews with 41 online students at a dual-mode regional Australian university. Interviewees reported very limited involvement with centralized support services. These appear to have…

The purpose of this project was to increase student achievement, engagement, and satisfaction using animated instructional videos in an online general psychology course at a community college. This project not only considered the data collected from student activity tracking, but also examined students' perception of how the videos engaged and…

Online courses can feel isolating and sometimes lack human connections that can motivate students. We developed a fully online geoscience course to build a 'Community of Inquiry' with attention to cognitive, social, and teaching presences. We ran the course using nearly identical materials for 8 semesters (recorded video lectures, labs,…

Research conducted by the British Council concerning modern continuous professional development of teachers has been analyzed. The issue concerning foreign language teachers' professional development has been considered. Productive approach to this process that gives a teacher the opportunities to define aspects of their professional activities…

Backers of the common-core academic standards have worked for years to secure the support of a diverse collection of elected officials, academic scholars, and school employees. Now they're ramping up efforts to court a different and potentially critically important audience: parents. A number of national organizations are churning out written and…

IRIS is designed to improve primary school teachers' use of dialogue and feedback through using video technology for collaborative teacher development with a view to improving academic outcomes for pupils. It is based around a video technology system (IRIS Connect) which enables teachers to record, edit, and comment on teaching and learning. In…

Student success and retention in postsecondary education, particularly in the area of mathematics, is a significant concern for educators across the nation. Over 60 percent of students who pass remedial math will persist to graduation, but less than 10 percent of those who fail will graduate. Many students in remedial courses have low…

The International General Certificate in Secondary Education (IGCSE) has expanded its consumer base from British-led and British-staffed international schools into schools that may not have faculty familiar with this examination. Non-British teachers must adapt their teaching methods to the culture within the curriculum of the IGCSE. However, a…

An analysis of data from the Community College Survey of Student Engagement and multiyear analysis of pretest/posttest scores in introductory criminal justice courses revealed there was a systemic decline in student engagement and achievement. Because of this analysis, a commercial virtual learning tool (CJI) that purported great success in…

Success rates in California community college developmental mathematics courses have hovered around 50% for decades. These gatekeeper courses have prevented many students from earning college degrees. Since community college is the starting point for the majority of California's potential college graduates and the majority of these students…

Due to federal mandates, Title I schools now are being asked to implement parent involvement programs that meaningfully involve parents in the schools to increase academic gains. This action research study was based on three different concepts from the literature: a) critical pedagogy theory from Paulo Freire, b) parent involvement from diverse…