Academic achievement, often measured by GPA, has been extensively studied in the literature of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, including its impact on student persistence and success in college (Rask, 2010). However, most research has only looked at students' performance at a single point in time, such as their…

As researchers in the social sciences, we are often interested in studying not directly observable constructs through assessments and questionnaires. But even in a well-designed and well-implemented study, rapid-guessing behavior may occur. Under rapid-guessing behavior, a task is skimmed shortly but not read and engaged with in-depth. Hence, a…

Black men and women have different levels of average educational attainment, yet few studies have focused on explaining how and why these patterns develop. One explanation may be inequality in experiences with institutional punishment through exclusionary school discipline and criminal justice exposure. Drawing on intersectional frameworks and…

Objective: Existing literature on young adults' e-cigarette and polysubstance use focused on college students. This study examined the differences between college and noncollege groups on prevalence and patterns of e-cigarette and other substance use using data from a national survey. Participants: Adults aged 18-24 from the 2013-2014 Population…

Monitoring the Future (MTF) is an ongoing research program conducted at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research under a series of investigator-initiated research grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse beginning in 1975. The integrated MTF study includes annual surveys of nationally-representative samples of 8th, 10th,…

Recent trends in higher education financing have increased students' need to borrow to afford college. This brief examines how federal student loan borrowing has changed from 2000 to 2016 by student race/ethnicity using logistic regression analysis and data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS). We find that the odds of…

Coaching female athletes is as rewarding as it is challenging. These athletes are usually more coachable, intelligent, and mature than males at similar ages. However, they are different in many ways from their male counterparts. For example, Drobnick (2012) and Merchant (2012) have emphasized women's communication styles as seeking feelings more…

Research suggests that massive open online course (MOOC) students prefer to study in groups, and that social facilitation within the study groups may render the learning of difficult concepts a pleasing experience. We report on a longitudinal study that investigates how co-located study groups watch and study MOOC videos together. The study was…

Previous research on sensation seeking (SS) was dominated by a variable-oriented approach indicating that SS level has a linear relation with a host of problem behaviors. Our aim was to provide a person-oriented methodology--a probabilistic clustering--that enables examination of both inter- and intra-individual differences in not only the level,…