Each year hundreds of institutions will administer national surveys to measure the engagement of their students. However, stakeholders on college campuses, such as educators (faculty, instructors, student affairs educators, and disability services administrators) and institutional research staff who work with this information are often unaware of…

With over 37 million residents, California is the most populous state in the country. California's primary and secondary schools enroll over 6.2 million students,1 and there are 3.4 million undergraduates attending 683 postsecondary institutions in California. Yet, because of the lack of a strong data infrastructure, we are unable to answer basic…

MDRC is working with the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office to study the state's efforts to improve college outcomes for Latinos--in particular, the approaches being taken at two-year and four-year colleges that qualify as Hispanic-Serving Institutions. This brief covers the first step in that project: a daylong conversation among…

Through a year-long study of welfare-to-work students in the community college CalWORKs program, we investigated what self-authorship development looks like by examining developmental progress, and whether there are patterns in development along the three dimensions of self-authorship. Findings demonstrate progress toward self-authorship, but…

Research has shown that dialogic instruction is a desirable method of curriculum delivery. Dialogic instruction encourages students to integrate cognitive and behavioral processes, thus leading to a broader transferable skill set. This study presented an overview of dialogic instruction related to various accepted learning theories, an examination…

As the Biden-Harris administration seeks to hasten the country's recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, reforming the U.S. higher education system to ensure equitable access and attainment for all adults is more important than ever. Most student parents are mothers, students of color, adult and working learners, students with low incomes, and…

The first CSRC Research Report to examine the Latina/o education pipeline, "Falling through the Cracks: Critical Transitions in the Latina/o Educational Pipeline" (Pérez Huber et al. 2006), inaugurated a series of reports that have sought to address critical issues related to the Latina/o education pipeline and to provide policy…

The Open Academic Analytics Initiative (OAAI) is a collaborative, multi-year grant program aimed at researching issues related to the scaling up of learning analytics technologies and solutions across all of higher education. The paper describes the goals and objectives of the OAAI, depicts the process and challenges of collecting, organizing and…

The past year highlighted and heightened California's key challenges. Millions of Californians lost jobs and income during the COVID-19 crisis; low-income families, communities of color, and women were hit hardest. As schools and universities shifted rapidly to remote learning, educators and parents scrambled to provide all students with…

The New Jersey Commission on Higher Education (the Commission) is required by statute (N.J.S.A. 18A: 62-46) to prepare an annual report to the Governor and Legislature containing a compilation of the data it collected about community college students who transferred to senior public institutions of higher education in New Jersey. At its July 25,…

The Higher Education Opportunity Act (E2SHB 1795), passed by the Legislature in 2011, identified prior learning assessment (PLA) as an innovative means for improving degree and certificate attainment and improving cost effectiveness and efficiency within Washington's higher education system. The Act defines prior learning as "the knowledge…

In 2011, the Louisiana Board of Regents (BoR), through the development and implementation of the Master Plan, advanced its vision for the future of postsecondary education by adopting the following three broad goals: (1) Increase the educational attainment of the State's adult population to the Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) States'…

The Community College Open Textbook Project (CCOTP) was developed to support the use of textbooks that are freely available and accessible online, and that can be adapted by teachers and learners to meet their unique needs and contexts. This article presents the findings of a research study conducted by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge…

The purpose of this study was to explore the essential leadership practices, abilities, and experiences of Deans of Career and Technical Education (CTE) and to consider how these Deans of CTE fit into the succession process of the community college. A qualitative case study was conducted with three dyads of career Deans and their supervising…

Institutions--even entire sectors of the education system--too often operate independently of each other, maintaining discrete student-record systems. This makes it difficult to trace a student's progress through higher education and into the workforce--and that disconnection hampers efforts to improve the system. Only by systematically collecting…