Community colleges provide broad access to a college degree due to their less expensive tuition, greater course time offerings, and more open admission policies compared to four-year universities as reported (Juszkiewicz, 2015). These institutions have great potential to diversify who chooses STEM, such as engineering. Such diverse representation…

Currently, the dropout rate is crucial in the field of Computer Science (CS) higher education. In CS education it is usually the mathematically oriented subjects that are blamed for the high dropout rates. Implementing a theoretical framework into practice, we have been able to prevent 28% of our students from dropping out in the last 2 years due…

Considerable research on effective instruction in the virtual classroom exists. Yet very little is known about the extent to which instructor presence (IP) based on the Community of Inquiry model (CoI), are directly related to retention and student success. CoI includes three components of IP: teaching (TP), cognitive (CP), and social (SP). These…

College student attrition rates remain a major concern and many students leave due to unsatisfactory academic performance. Colleges have responded by offering first-year seminars focused on study skills. There is limited research on the effectiveness of these programmes. More research is needed to assess actual student behaviours after completing…

We examined three large freshman cohorts from Texas State University, a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI), to identify risk factors that might affect academic retention. Risk factors supported by empirical studies such as first-generation, ethnicity, gender, financial aid need, high school performance, and living off campus were examined. We also…

This study examined long-term persistence differences between three samples of first-year online graduate students to understand the impact an early intervention had on students who failed the first assignment in their first course. A Fisher's exact test showed no statistically significant difference in the likelihood of remaining enrolled at the…

This study addresses the retention problems of at-risk students in the Foundation Year Program at the Bahrain Teachers' College. Data were collected from the instructors and the students using questionnaires and focus group interviews. Findings show that both instructors and students think the college could play a more active role to increase the…

The transition from school to university can prove problematic for a number of academic and social reasons and first-year attrition rates are high. Research suggests that first-year students need help adjusting to a new phase of learning in a larger community of practice and that a student's decision to leave represents a negative combination of…

The highest attrition rates occur among first-year students. Universities have designed different curricular programmes, such as the development of generic skills, to address this challenge. In the medical school at the University of the Free State in South Africa, these skills were incorporated in the MBChB curriculum as an eight credit-bearing…

Massive Open Online Courses appear to have high attrition rates, involve students in peer-assessment with patriotic bias and promote education for already educated people. This paper suggests a formative assessment model which takes into consideration these issues. Specifically, this paper focuses on the assessment of open-format questions in…

Problem: Undergraduate and graduate students frequently experience psychological distress that often results in impairment and psychopathology, and effective interventions are thus needed. This work represents a replication of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) to reduce psychological distress; secondary objectives include: evaluating…

"Summer melt," an all-too-common phenomenon that predominantly affects low-income and first-generation students during a critical 100-day period between high school graduation and what should be the first day of college. Some students who have been accepted to college simply do not show up to enroll. Admissions officers nationwide have…

Despite decades of policy intervention to increase college entry and success among low-income students, considerable gaps by socioeconomic status remain. To date, policymakers have overlooked the summer after high school as an important time period in students' transition to college, yet recent research documents high rates of summer attrition…

This article reports on the development and implementation of the Student Success Program, a strategic, University-wide, consistent approach to increasing the success and retention of first year students, during 2014. To this end, a centrally coordinated process integrated historic student, application, enrolment, academic performance and learning…

University enabling programs, worldwide, generally target high school students who excel at school, or post-secondary students who have underperformed in their university entry examinations. Murdoch University provides an access program for Year/Grade 12 students who are not on a university pathway during their final year of high school. This…