Most freshmen enter universities with high expectations and with good motivation, but too many are driven into performing instead of true learning. The issues are not only related to the challenge of comprehending the substance, social and other factors have an impact as well. All these multifaceted needs should be accounted for to facilitate…

Both an art and a science, enrollment projections have become a major component to effective college and university fiscal planning. With stagnant or declining state budget support for public higher education along with an increasing emphasis on revenue generation, never before has predicting the size of an entering class become more imperative.…

Open book assessment is not a new idea, but it does not seem to have gained ground in higher education. In particular, not much literature is available on open book examinations in mathematics and statistics in higher education. The objective of this paper is to investigate the appropriateness of open book assessments in a first-year business…

Given the financial implications for studying at a higher education institution, students are faced with many decisions both in terms of the topics they wish to study but also the decision of whether to remain at home or move away. The aim of this article is to compare the experiences of South Asian (Indian, Bangladeshi and Pakistani) female…

There is much debate about whether or not these days students should be able to word-process essay-type examinations as opposed to handwriting them, particularly when they are asked to word-process everything else. This study used word-processing software to examine the stylistic features of 13 examination essays written by hand and 24 by…

This study uses three cohorts of first-time, full-time undergraduate students (N = 8,652) at a large, metropolitan, public research university to examine the impact of student use of three library resources (workstations, study rooms, and research clinics) on academic performance. To deal with self-selection bias and estimate this impact more…

The authors of this article implement a quasi-experimental strategy to estimate peer effects in economic education by exploiting the institutional setting in a large public university in China, where roommates are randomly assigned conditional on a student's major and province of origin. They found significant impacts of peer academic quality,…

The prominence of discourse on postsecondary degree completion, student persistence, and retention has increased in the national dialogue. Heightened attention to college completion rates by the federal government and pressure to tie state funding to performance metrics associated with graduation rates are catalysts for the discussion.…

Background. Although the evidence in support of the variability of students' learning strategies has expanded in recent years, less is known about the explanatory base of these individual differences in terms of the joint Influences of personal and contextual characteristics. Aims. Previous studies have often investigated how student learning is…

An individual's activities are closely related with his/her communication abilities. One's awareness of his feelings and needs and to what extend he can control such feelings are the key factors which effect communication abilities. Webster (1996) defines anger as, "a strong emotion; a feeling that is oriented toward some real or supposed…

Success and Interactive Learning's (SAIL) front-loaded retention activities and unique financial incentives have combined to improve retention, persistence, and success of first-time college students. Its effectiveness has been validated through a comparison of retention rates and aggregate quality-point averages of SAIL cohorts with those rates…

Describes a laboratory experiment dissolving zinc from galvanized nails in which data can be gathered very quickly for statistical analysis. The data have sufficient significant figures and the experiment yields a nice distribution of random errors. Freshman students can gain an appreciation of the relationships between random error, number of…

The relationship between living environment, gender and both overall adjustment to college and social adjustment in freshmen students was examined in this study. The College Adjustment Scales were administered to 511 freshmen students living in on-campus housing. There were 259 students living in Freshmen Year Experience (FYE) Halls verses 252…

A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using AMOS 4.0 to validate the 21-item Career Factors Inventory on a community college student sample. The multidimensional inventory assesses types and levels of career indecision antecedents. The sample consisted of 512 ethnically diverse freshmen students; 46% were men and 54% were women.…

Data tables from a 1999 survey of college freshmen provide extensive data concerning demography (e.g., parental occupation, family income), reasons for college choice, college major plans for men and women, financial status, frequent activities, high school grades, opinions and goals, (DB)