General chemistry are key gateway courses for many Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) majors. To improve student outcomes, it is critical both to identify at-risk students and implement evidence-based instructional strategies and interventions. These remain active areas of investigation, with recent literature showing that…

The problem addressed by this study was whether a shift toward student control could yield a greater academic benefit in student academic achievement than the traditional usage of teacher control since there is a growing perception the adoption of student-centered education will better support the academic needs of students than teacher-centered…

Born on the eve of the Civil War, community colleges were designed to provide access to higher education for the masses. Community colleges, also referred to as "the people's college," were a radical departure from the traditional institutions of higher education. One significant difference, compared to other institutions of higher…

A developmental model linking professionalism and character growth is implemented at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point (USMA) through its programs and policies. The current study used growth-modeling techniques to examine developmental relationships between metrics of professional development and performance outcomes at USMA and assessed…

In this paper, we evaluate the complete undergraduate co-enrollment network over a decade of education at a large American public university. We provide descriptive and exploratory analyses of the network, demonstrating that the co-enrollment networks evaluated follow power-law degree distributions similar to many other large-scale networks; that…

Objective: To examine differences in marijuana consumption, access to marijuana, and perception of harm of consuming marijuana among college students enrolled in a small liberal arts college versus a large state university. Methods: Currently enrolled college students at a liberal arts college or large state university were e-mailed a link to an…

This study analyzed the results of undergraduate and graduate teacher candidate scores on the Elementary Missouri Content Assessment at a private Midwestern University. The intent was to examine the possibility of a difference between pre-service teachers who satisfied coursework requirements through an undergraduate program or through a graduate…

This article discusses the design and implementation of a new programming tool for Greek novices as a means to improve introductory programing instruction in Greece. We implemented Koios, a new highly interactive and visual programming tool for Greek novices, based on the body of research in the field of psychology of programming. The main…

This research compares the academic performance of two groups of students at the community college level of higher education. These two groups are dual credit students and non-dual credit students. The academic records of these students were examined from the years 2010-2014. Students in both groups had completed their formal high school education…

Faculty members and their corresponding academic fields at the University of Puerto Rico at Bayamón are classified with regard to grading practices over time. Based on the effects on the intercept of the equations that predict the GPA and the proportion of student withdrawals observed in each of the 39,337 courses offered during 41 consecutive…

The effects of offering and seizing optional learning opportunities rarely have been investigated. Thus, university instructors have no basis on which to decide whether offering optional learning opportunities to their students would be worth the effort and which students would seize and benefit from them. To target these questions, we designed a…

It has often been lamented that girls are more likely not to attend or to drop-out (for example, because of gender preference by the parents, insecurity, pregnancy, amongst many other postulated factors) or that their achievement even if they stay in school is worse than boys. For the former, UNESCO introduced the Gender Parity Index (GPI), which…

First-generation college students have received little attention in the social work literature. National data on first-generation students in social work are not collected. However, it is possible that first-generation students are overrepresented in social work programs. This study seeks to fill a critical gap in our literature by investigating…

Self-referent performance beliefs can influence people's decision making related to long-term goals. Current measures of such beliefs, however, do not explicitly focus on the long-term aspects of goal achievement. We introduce a new concept, Long-Term Prospects (LTP), which is defined as the self-perception that one can maintain the continuous…

We present in-depth cases of four low-income Chinese American adolescents' perceptions of their parents' educational messages using a discourse analytic approach. We asked how students construct and draw on discourses in order to produce interpretations of their schooling responsibilities, in light of parental messages. Our analysis uncovered how…