Increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participation in higher education can play a critical role in transforming lives and is the trajectory to closing the gap and reducing disadvantage. Despite recent progress, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples remain significantly under-represented in higher education. Poor retention and…

State education departments find themselves pressured to reduce costs while improving student performance. To do so, state education departments must measure the performance of each school district in an objective, data-informed manner. We present a benchmarking methodology and illustrate its application in New York State school districts. We…

Lyman Briggs College is a small residential college within Michigan State University, devoted to preparing students for STEM careers via preparation in the biophysical sciences that is paired with the humanistic and social scientific study of science and sciences humanistic and social dimensions. This paper reports and interprets the quantitative…

What do students learn in school? In the 21 century, this question has become a political dilemma for countries around the globe. It is a deceptively simple question, but there has never been an easy answer. The problem of measuring student learning appears to express an educational problem: What and how much do students learn? Most student…

The persistence of postgraduate research students is an ongoing challenge for many university programs. The author describes several curriculum innovations that were implemented based on the recommendations in the literature for improving student persistence and self-efficacy for conducting research and the results of a qualitative needs…

An estimated 1,400 colleges and universities nationwide have invested in predictive analytics technology to identify which students are at risk of failing courses or dropping out, with spending estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. How accurate and stable are those predictions? The authors put six predictive models to the test to gain…

Although many institutions and government agencies count degrees as the sole measure of determining departmental or program viability, this method fails to consider other factors such as how many students who are within programs are present to replace students who graduated from those programs or how many credit hours were generated in the area.…

We study the combined effects of charter schools, and their various mechanisms, on a national level and across multiple outcomes. Using difference-in-differences and fixed effects methods, we find that charter entry (above 10 percent market share) increases high school graduation rate in geographic districts by about 2-4 percentage points and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the predictability of types of mentoring relationships on the perceived academic success, retention status, graduation status, and progression status of undergraduate students in the United States. Specifically, this study focused on the predictable relationship between types of mentoring relationships such…

In an era of accountability for educational performance, community colleges should know whether student success is influenced by hiring racially diverse employees. Student interactions with diverse individuals improve student achievement on key performance indicators. This correlational study expands the limited body of knowledge on the…

Student retention and graduation in higher education are important goals for institutions across the U.S., yet improving rates of first-year retention and graduation has proven challenging. One strategy promoted for improving these rates of student success is increasing levels of student engagement in the classroom and within the larger academic…

This research study provides campus-type specific insight into the graduation rates of students of color at a departmental (i.e., School of Business) level. With underrepresented student populations comprising up to a third of business school enrollment, there is institutional and departmental value in understanding how, and at what levels,…

There is an increasingly large disparity in college graduation rates among low-income and first-generation college students. Research suggests that the main reason for this discrepancy is the lack of access to information and knowledge about the college process. First-generation students have fewer people in their social network who went to…

This study assessed needs and outcomes for people with developmental disability (DD) to understand the socioeconomic status of this group prior to implementation of the Accessible Canada Act in June 2019. The 2017 Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD) was used to analyze data for a sample of individuals with self-reported disability. Data related to…

The long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is an important consideration given the trend of dedicating more resources to these programs. However, long-term impact of prekindergarten programs is not well-understood and recent studies have shown preschool effectiveness can vary across states and programs. A state run prekindergarten program in…