Early alert systems (EAS) are an important technological tool to help manage and improve student retention. Data spanning 16,091 students over 156 weeks was collected from a regionally based university in Australia to explore various microeconometric approaches that establish links between EAS and student retention outcomes. Controlling for…

Each year students spend thousands of hours participating in discussion forums. Yet there has not been sufficient scholarship on the observable effects of discussion forums on learning outcomes, and there is not a clear understanding of the role discussion forums play in transmitting knowledge of course concepts to students. This study…

In this paper we explore and discuss an important research question in higher education--is there a trade-off relationship between in-class and out-of-class efforts for students? We used an empirical model to test the trade-off hypothesis between these two efforts. We identified a trade-off between in-class and out-of-class efforts, especially for…

The author presents new evidence on the effects of attendance on academic performance. He used a large panel data set for introductory microeconomics students to explicitly take into account the effect of unobservable factors correlated with attendance, such as ability, effort, and motivation. He found that neither proxy variables nor instrumental…