Educational opportunities have a very important impact on a person's life. Employment, earnings, well-being, health and trust are all strongly related to education and skills. A lack of high-quality educational opportunities is the most important way in which poverty, social inequality and exclusion are transmitted from one generation to another.…

In this article, I introduce a novel applet ("module") for exploring probability distributions, their samples, and various related statistical concepts. The module is primarily designed to be used by the instructor in the introductory course, but it can be used far beyond it as well. It is a free, cross-platform, stand-alone interactive…

There is considerable research on the difficulties students have in conceptualising individual concepts of probability and statistics (see for example, Bryant & Nunes, 2012; Jones, 2005). The unit of work developed for the action research project described in this article is specifically designed to address some of these in order to help…

When choosing a career, jobseekers often want to know which occupations offer the best prospects. Generally, occupations that have rapid job growth, many new jobs, or many job openings--and good wages--promise better opportunities. This paper shows how employment in particular occupations is projected to change from 2010 to 2020. It presents…

The Performance Measures for Student Success Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled from the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 2010, President Scott Ralls…

The Student Transitions Project (STP) has reached a ten-year milestone: The STP has now collected student enrollment data from ten years of grade 12 graduation cohorts and ten years of post-secondary registrants, since the project's inception in 2003. The STP dataset continues to be an invaluable tool for tracking student transitions into…

The Performance Measures for Student Success Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled from the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 2010, President Scott Ralls…

In recent years educators and policymakers have set a goal that students graduate from high school ready for college and careers. However, as a nation we are far from achieving this goal, particularly for low-income and minority students. For example, in states where all eleventh-graders take the ACT[R], only 27 percent of low-income students in…

This report presents the number of high school completers, the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), and the dropout data for grades 9-12 for public schools in school year 2009-10. State Education Agencies (SEAs) report annual counts of completers, dropouts, and enrollments to the National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) Common Core of…

Nationwide, from 2005 to 2010, 1.6 minority (non-white) students enrolled in college for every additional white student who enrolled. In the SREB (Southern Regional Education Board) region that meant 700,312 more minority college students and 411,915 more white college students. Increases in minority student enrollment accounted for almost…

When taking mathematics courses, students will sometimes ask their recurring question, "When will I ever use this in real life?" Educators are often unable to provide a direct connection between what they are teaching in the classroom and a real-life application. However, when such an opportunity does arise, they should seize it and…

From 2000 to 2008, enrollments by recent high school graduates grew faster than enrollments by adults age 25 and older (25.3 percent v. 23.6 percent). Between 2009 and 2019, this trend is expected to reverse, with adult enrollments increasing by twice as much as enrollments by traditional age students (22.6 percent vs. 9.7 percent). This paper…

This paper identifies key concepts and issues associated with the reasoning of informal statistical inference. I focus on key ideas of inference that I think all students should learn, including at secondary level as well as tertiary. I argue that a fundamental component of inference is to go beyond the data at hand, and I propose that statistical…

In a more consistent and viable manner than ever before, education in Alabama is moving toward its ultimate goal of providing every student with a quality education, thereby preparing them for work, college, and life after high school. Alabama's graduation rates from 2002 to 2008 increased significantly, tripling the national average increase and…

In October 2005, 68.6 percent of high school graduates from the class of 2005 were enrolled in colleges or universities, according to data released on March 24, 2006 by the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics. The college enrollment rate for recent high school graduates was a historical high for the series dating back to 1959.…