We analyze admissions and transcript records for students at multiple Ivy-Plus colleges to study the relationship between standardized (SAT/ACT) test scores, high school GPA, and first-year college grades. Standardized test scores predict academic outcomes with a normalized slope four times greater than that from high school GPA, all conditional…

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability understand that other people's mental states may be different from one's own. Psychometric models have shown that individual differences in ToM can largely be attributed to general intelligence ("g") (Coyle et al. 2018). Most psychometric models specify "g" as a reflective latent variable,…

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

This quantitative study used archived student records to determine which high school and postsecondary factors are the most significant predictors of college retention among 2,175 students enrolled at the University of West Georgia in Fall 2018. A two-tailed t-test was conducted for research questions one and two to analyze the high school GPAs…

As access to higher education increases, it is important to monitor students with special needs to facilitate the provision of appropriate resources and support. Although metrics such as the "reading readiness" ACT (formerly American College Testing) of provide insight into how many students may need such resources, they do not specify…

Early college entrance programs have existed in the United States since the 1950s, but in-depth research on academic success in these programs is lacking. Every year, early college entrance programs utilize a variety of data-gathering and candidate-screening techniques to select hundreds of students for admission into these accelerated programs.…

Preparing for exams in introductory biology classrooms is a complex metacognitive task. Focusing on lower achieving students (those with entering ACT scores below the median at our institution), we compared the effect of two different assignments distributed ahead of exams by dividing classes in half to receive either terms to define or open-ended…

Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

This study investigated factors influencing Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation (FMCE) pretest and post-test scores for a sample (N=1116 students) collected in the introductory calculus-based mechanics class at a large eastern land-grant university. Several academic and noncognitive factors were examined using correlation analysis and linear…

As access to higher education increases, it is important to monitor students with special needs to facilitate the provision of appropriate resources and support. Although metrics such as ACT's (formerly American College Testing) "reading readiness" provide insight into how many students may need such resources, they do not specify…

Academic achievement is one of the central outcomes targeted by all major models of youth development. Youth who succeed academically are well-positioned to thrive through meaningful careers, positions of community leadership, and fulfilling personal and family lives (Arnold, 2018). As such, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB)…

We sought to replicate prior findings that admissions tests' underprediction of female college performance was driven in part by the omission of Big 5 personality factors from the predictive model, using 5,400 college students. We investigated gender differences in an elaborated model subdividing the Big 5 into ten aspects. We found differences at…

This paper studies the causal impacts of public universities on the outcomes of their marginally admitted students. I use administrative admission records spanning all 35 public universities in Texas, which collectively enroll 10 percent of American public university students, to systematically identify and employ decentralized cutoffs in SAT/ACT…

Standardized reading assessments are often used as an admissions criterion for college admittance, however, the relationship and predictive validity of reading assessments to academic achievement remains in question. Through a quantitative review of the literature, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine how well performance on college reading…