Remedial courses have been part of the college landscape in the United States since at least the 1800s when nearly 250,000 students were placed into remedial courses. Traditionally, students who enrolled in remedial courses were placed into that course solely based on one test score. Students who enrolled in traditional remedial courses were more…

Increasingly, colleges and universities are being compared and evaluated based on the outcomes that their students experience. While both self-evaluation and accountability are valuable, one should be careful that the right outcomes are measured. Using data from 21 community colleges, we find that traditional measures often ignore key positive…

How should colleges determine whether students are placed into developmental or college-level courses? Each year, colleges place millions of students into developmental math and English courses upon enrollment. To do so, colleges most often use a high-stakes placement test, which numerous research studies have shown to be highly inaccurate in…

The prevalence and emergence of college promise programs presents interesting and important methodological challenges. Based on their immediate access to de-identified data of applicants and enrollees, institutional researchers are in a privileged position to rigorously assess the effect of these programs in a myriad of outcomes. This study is a…

As participation in online learning continues to expand, higher education institutions must implement policies and procedures to ensure quality at the course, program, and institution levels. In this paper, the authors describe a process that the State University of New York (SUNY) System implemented, utilizing the OLC Quality Scorecard, to help…

Assessing a student's ability to be successful in courses and programs is an important and necessary aspect of student success. Two major practices exist to predict a student's likelihood of succeeding in a course or program: (1) Successful completion of prerequisite or advisory courses (as documented on transcripts) and (2) the assessment for…

The purpose of the current study was to develop and validate a measure of motivation for use with basic college writers that would measure self-efficacy, achievement goals, beliefs, and affect. As part of a design research project on curriculum for community college developmental writing classes, 133 students in 11 classes completed the motivation…

This paper presents a pilot study aiming to evaluate the effects of a non-cognitive assessment instrument which was developed and tailored for a community college in the New York City area. The instrument was pilot tested on a group of developmental students and asked a series of questions to determine the campus support services that might best…

The Benefits Access for College Completion (BACC) initiative funds innovative approaches to increase the number of students earning postsecondary credentials by connecting students to public benefits in seven community and technical colleges across the country. BACC was launched in September 2011 to help colleges develop and institutionalize…

We introduce an educational game-based assessment that measures the choices students make while learning. We present Posterlet, a game designed to assess students' choices to seek negative feedback and to revise, in which students learn graphical design principles while creating posters. We validate our game-based assessment approach with three…

Many learning center administrators understand the need to evaluate the effectiveness of their tutoring programs, but they do not have much free time to design and conduct meaningful research. This article presents a method of evaluation that can be used to determine whether students were able to demonstrate understanding after a tutoring…

A comprehensive, four-phase approach was used to test the feasibility of an online, tailored health program for community college students. The prototype was perceived by students as relevant and useful; practitioners were favorable toward offering the program as part of orientation and in a credit-course format. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

To enhance their competitive advantage in the marketplace, many business leaders develop market orientation strategies designed to increase customer engagement. These market orientation strategies include improvement in service delivery, relationship management, customer satisfaction, and quality control methods. There is a lack of understanding…

This paper addresses the transition of community college students to degree programs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The paper presents the results of an evaluation of a two-week residential summer bridge program that recruited community college students from a wide range of academic, ethnic, and socioeconomic…

Consonance and dissonance are subjective perceptions that are reactions of the human ear to whether or not musical intervals sound "pleasing." The physical causes of consonance and dissonance are not as well understood as other subjective properties of sound perceived by the ear such as pitch, loudness, and quality (timbre). What follows is an…