In this study, the authors examined whether placing demographic questions at the beginning of a survey impacts student responses to a social and emotional skills assessment. Participants were students who took the ACT® test on the national testing date in December 2019 and responded to an invitation to participate in research after completing the…

Participants include 89 college students from a tribal university in the Midwestern United States. A survey regarding attitudes and adjustment to campus was administered to all students during their first semester of college. Variables assessed included psychosociocultural integration factors, such as educational goals, trust of others at college,…

Most students finish high school with low levels of financial knowledge, yet they are months away from important decisions about how to finance college. Students may not know about family finances, even though parental income is a key determinant of financial aid for college. This study measures the financial knowledge of high school students by…

The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether the use of non-cognitive assessment in combination with traditional criteria predicted potential academic success as measured by first-semester GPAs of provisionally admitted students. Survey data were collected with a non-cognitive questionnaire (NCQ) from provisionally admitted…

Researchers have confirmed that students' motivation is one of the most important factors educators can target to improve learning (Williams & Williams, 2011). This study explored the role which student's motivation played in the retention of first-time, full-time freshman (FTFTF) STEM majors at University (U) (blinded). Student motivational…

This investigation sought to determine when colleges should conduct assessments to identify first-year students at risk of dropping out. Thirty-five variables were used to predict the persistence of 2,024 first-year students from four universities in the southeastern United States. The predictors were subdivided into groups according to when they…

Relativizing the popular belief that student effort is the key to success, this article finds that effort in the most advanced mathematics course in US high schools is not consistently associated with college calculus performance. We distinguish two types of student effort: productive and ineffective efforts. Whereas the former carries the…

This mixed-methods study approach investigated the impact of standardized tests on student achievement from the STEM program and the traditional program in a suburban high school. Qualitative data were collected from interviews, focus groups, and questionnaires to get perceptual data from teachers. Quantitative data were collected from different…

This article reports on an alumni study of middle school participants in a university-based science camp; at the time of the study the youth were completing their junior or senior year of high school. The science- and technology-intensive program was set in an intentionally designed positive youth development context. The camp was free to youth…

Undergraduate grade point average (GPA) is a commonly employed measure in educational research, serving as a criterion or as a predictor depending on the research question. Over the decades, researchers have used a variety of reliability coefficients to estimate the reliability of undergraduate GPA, which suggests that there has been no consensus…

This study examined the contributions of students' noncognitive characteristics toward explaining performance on the ACT® test, over and above traditional predictors such as high school grade point average (HSGPA), coursework taken, and school characteristics. The sample consisted of 6,440 high school seniors from 4,541 schools who took the ACT in…

Self-control has been related to positive student outcomes including academic performance of college students. Because of the critical nature of the first semester academic performance for engineering students in terms of retention and persistence in pursuing an engineering degree, this study investigated the relationship between freshmen…

The current study uses survey methods to understand how US college students' use of various types of social media, such as social networking websites and text messaging on smart phones, as well as consumption of traditional media, such as watching television and reading books for pleasure, is (or is not) related to intellectual cognitive…

In a quasi-experimental evaluation of the possible role of stereotype threat in the academic performance of college students with learning disabilities (LD), students with (N = 29) and without (N = 62) identified LD took a simulated Verbal GRE® task in one of two conditions modeled after those used in past stereotype threat (ST) research. The task…

This study gathered, analyzed, and compared perspectives of students who were honors-eligible but never began the program, students who began in honors and discontinued their enrollment, and those who were persisting in honors. Broadly speaking (and not surprisingly), the responses of students persisting in honors reflected the most positive…