This handbook provides assistance for tutors in Operation Success, a program to provide limited-income and first-generation college students with academic support services to enable them to persist and graduate from Wichita State University (Kansas). The program provides an interconnected series of academic support services; peer tutoring is…

In 1984, a year-long evaluation was conducted at Los Medanos College (California) of the Language Arts Tutorial Program, a cross-curricular assessment and retention program built around course-specific assessments and tutorial assistance. The primary objective of the evaluation was to measure the effectiveness of the assessment procedure and…

Eight New Jersey State colleges which shared essentially the same goals and offered similar financial aid packages were studied in order to determine the relationship between persistence rates of disadvantaged students in opportunity programs and the role of faculty in such programs. Student data were provided by New Jersey's Equal Opportunity…

Studies suggest that developmental students like peer tutoring, are more relaxed with peers, and feel that peer tutoring helps their grades. However, the small number of studies on college tutoring provides no consistent evidence that underprepared students who are tutored improve either their grades or grade point averages. The students who do…

The Supplemental Instruction (SI) program of the University of Missouri-Kansas City addresses attrition by providing academic support in courses that are high risk for students. The program contains a number of innovative features, for example: high risk courses are identified instead of high risk students, and everyone in those courses is offered…

A project was implemented at Florence-Darlington Technical College (FDTC) in Florence, South Carolina to develop a retention plan for high-risk and probationary students. The project involved the following components: a literature review on retention strategies, visits to state-of-the-art model two-year college retention programs, studies of…

This issue of the "VCCA Journal" contains the following articles: (1) "Dear Andrei--Dear Patricia: International Education in English Composition I," by Robert Kilmer; (2) "The Cultivation of Critical Thinking: Some Tools and Techniques," by Russell Crescimanno; (3) "Assessment Partnership: A Model for Two-Year…

This report describes the key elements of an alternative access program at Mount St. Mary's College (California), from the recruitment and orientation of culturally diverse students to those ongoing academic and support services necessary to student persistence to graduation. The model is outlined in chapter II. Chapters III and IV describe how…