According to a paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, first-year college students who are assigned roommates with video-game consoles study 40 minutes less per day, on average, than first-year students whose roommates did not bring consoles. And that reduction in study time has a sizable effect on grades: First-year students…

Many high-achieving students do not question their academic success. They do well and are content with the study skills they have developed to ensure that they achieve their goals. However, these students, whose high schools considered them achievers, experience difficulties and sometimes failure in situations where they had previously experienced…

This report describes self-reported attitudes and motivations of first-year college students nationally at the beginning of the undergraduate experience, based on a 100-item motivational assessment administered in the summer and fall of 2010. Highlighted this year are attitudes that may limit academic engagement, suggesting the need for…

The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) and its companion projects serve colleges and universities committed to monitoring and improving the quality of the undergraduate experience. While participating institutions receive detailed customized reports, the "Annual Results" series presents noteworthy aggregate findings from the…

This report describes the self-reported attitudes and motivations of first-year students nationally at the beginning of the undergraduate experience, based on a 100-item motivational assessment administered in the summer and fall of 2009. In particular, the report examines attitudes that may have posed barriers and opportunities for students as…

In 2015, the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) collected responses from more than 315,000 first-year and senior students attending 585 bachelor's degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States and Canada. This report presents selected NSSE results from students at 541 U.S. institutions or subsets of that group where…

With the current concern over the growing need for more engineers, there is an immediate need to improve freshman engineering retention. A working model for freshman engineering retention is needed. This paper proposes such a model based on Tinto's Interactionalist Theory. Emphasis in this model is placed on pre-college characteristics as…

The preceptor program at the University of Hartford was designed to increase engagement among first-year students and to provide role-modeling opportunities for upper-class students. Data from the first two years of the program were examined. In the first year, 611 undergraduate students in 40 introductory-level courses (26 with preceptors, 14…

Included in this addendum are the findings for the Noel-Levitz 2011 National Freshman Attitudes Report by race/ethnicity for incoming students. These data show the percentage of students within each group that agreed with each item. Demographic breakdown of the respondents is presented on pages 7 and 8. [For related report, "National Freshman…

This paper is based on the experience acquired in teaching materials science/engineering to first year university students. It has been observed that students struggle with some of the fundamental materials concepts addressed in the module/course. This applies to delivered lectures but extends to the incorporation of tutorial sessions provided…

We examined subjective experiences in activities and perceptions of growth in a sample of first-year female university students (N = 196; age range = 17 to 19 years old, M = 18.48, SD = 0.53; the most common ethnic affiliations were British Isles, 51% of respondents, Canadian, 34%, French, 14%, and German, 8%). Students described 4 activities,…

Science students who perform poorly in introductory science classes often don't know how to do better because they "don't know that they don't know", and they have poor critical thinking and problem solving skills. The current study describes how modeling and coaching students in "active study" improves higher order thinking…

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…

The 10th International Conference on Educational Data Mining (EDM 2017) is held under the auspices of the International Educational Data Mining Society at the Optics Velley Kingdom Plaza Hotel, Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. This years conference features two invited talks by: Dr. Jie Tang, Associate Professor with the Department of Computer…