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…

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 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…

School-based agricultural education programs provide contextualized learning environments for the teaching of core academic subject matter. This study sought to examine the mathematics efficacy and professional development needs of Wyoming agricultural education teachers related to teaching contextualized mathematics. Wyoming agricultural…

The purpose of this study was to gain an in depth knowledge of the day to day activities of home school families in order to better understand the instructional approaches, curriculum decisions, and challenges. Four themes were addressed: motivations, operations, resources, and challenges. Findings about motivations to home school included: (a)…

This survey was a followup of the college experiences and achievements of 4009 second-year students at 29 two-year colleges. Students gave data on their background and plans, participation in non-academic activities, financial and work status, and general satisfaction with the college. Most planned to transfer to a 4-year college. They were…

In the spring of 1966, a follow-up study of the original form of the ACT Student Profile Section (SPS) was conducted at 35 colleges. As a part of the larger study, this report investigates the question of how accurately the students' pre-college responses predicted their behavior and plans during the first year of college. The follow-up data were…

A followup study of the 1966 and 1967 graduates of the registered nurses program at Foothill College (Calif.) sought to identify characteristics which distinguished students who completed the program from those who did not graduate, analyze scores on the state licensing examination for the licensing of nurses to determine what significant…

For the past six years the National Assessment of Educational Progress has sponsored a national Conference on Large-Scale Assessment, designed to promote and improve communications among educational assessment personnel in State Departments of Education and other agencies. This volume contains most of the papers that were accepted for presentation…