In 2011-12, graduate students received a total of $51.7 billion in federal loans and grants, institutional grants, employer support, and financial aid from other sources. In 2007-08, this figure was $36.7 billion (College Board 2008, 2012). The data presented in these Web Tables were collected through five administrations of the National…

Researchers, educators, and policymakers are focusing more on student engagement as the key to addressing low achievement, student boredom and alienation, and high dropout rates (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004). As schools and districts seek to increase engagement, it is important for them to understand how it has been defined and to assess…

In this paper we consider the challenges involved in evaluating teacher preparation programs when controlling for school contextual bias. Including school fixed effects in the achievement models used to estimate preparation program effects controls for school environment by relying on differences among student outcomes within the same schools to…

Reverse transferring, or moving from a four-year institution to a community college, has been depicted in recent research as one of the major forms of student mobility. Since reverse transferring is associated with extremely low rates of degree completion, it is critical to better understand the predictors of reverse transferring and what happens…

Scholastic aptitude, mathematics achievement, and high school rank were used as college entry predictors of achievement in a foundation engineering curriculum for 1,779 freshmen enrolling in engineering at the University of Texas at Austin during the years 1974-77. Achievement in the foundation engineering curriculum was measured by taking…

A 12-item survey of English background and proficiency was administered to all Washington State University freshman English students on the first day of class during the fall semester of 1977. A sample of 700 completed questionnaires was selected for analysis. In general, student responses indicated an overall weakness in the teaching of writing…

The document reports the second phase in a project to determine the relevant and important characteristics of effective teachers and deals with the identification of predictor constructs in the evaluation of vocational teachers. The objectives involved: (1) obtaining predictor constructs in the areas of biographic-demographic information about the…

A study of third-year medical school discussion groups was undertaken to determine how much the cognitive level of instructors' questions in small group sessions influenced student responses and whether these responses had any measureable relationship to critical thinking skills, or National Board of Medical Examiner (NBME) scores. The research…