Career services in higher education has a long history of supporting student development and post-graduation success (American Council on Education, 1937; Rayman, 1999; Dey & Cruzvergara, 2014). However, there is a dearth of research identifying specific connections between engagement with career services and student success. College student…

This descriptive study offers lessons learned from students' experiences with a gamified, social media-like instructional approach in eighteen courses from spring 2021 through spring 2022. Researchers at a mid-sized university in the southeastern United States leveraged Christensen's (2011) disruptive innovation theory as a guiding framework to…

All students studying Computer Science (CS) deserve to have their basic psychological need for belonging satisfied. In this dissertation, I present two studies of belonging among CS students at the University of Washington-Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. In the first study, my collaborators implemented a resubmission…

This multiple descriptive case study explores how university students responded to their Business Communications course's transitioning to an emergency remote course during the spring semester of 2020. Thirty-nine students completed an end-of-semester questionnaire that recorded their impressions of learning and course satisfaction. Nine of those…

COVID-19 had a disastrous impact on the education sector resulting in a boom of online learning systems. This shift has severely impacted the underprivileged students with special needs due to the sudden implementation of prolonged distance learning. Thus, it creates an immense need to analyze distance learning media's effectiveness during the…

The education sector was severely impacted due to the pandemic; thus, educational institutions had to shift toward an online learning system. This adaptation in the educational system posits a challenging question: which mode of learning would be best to engage and satisfy the students in the post-COVID-19 era? Therefore, drawing on the…

Understanding the experiences and preferences of international students during their programs of study can be crucial for how institutions of higher education recruit, retain, and ensure the success of students in an increasingly competitive global market. While there is a well-established body of literature on the academic and living experiences…

Research shows that a lack of peer study support, particularly a lack of friends in the major, is linked to students switching majors. Furthermore, strong relationships with faculty have a significant influence on students' decisions to persist in the major. However, it is unclear how the creation of an environment that fosters student research…

Getting increasingly common in many settings in higher education, distance language courses have become a vigorous area of research which requires sustained focus. Although the relevant literature has documented well various aspects of distance language learning, the factors affecting academic achievement have remained under-researched. This study…

To promote learning and academic success among undergraduates, many colleges and universities offer or require students to participate in high-impact practices, which include first-year seminars, learning communities, writing-intensive courses, service-learning, diversity/global learning, internships, and capstone projects. However, the research…

Using a state-wide college student dataset, this study examined how the type of student-faculty interaction uniquely conditions the predictors of student-faculty interaction (student characteristics affecting the level of student-faculty interaction, in this case) as well as the effects of such interaction on select college outcomes. The results…

Based on Boyer's (1990) principles of community, the purpose of this study was to examine how students' perceived sense of campus community contributed to explaining their satisfaction with school life. Participants were randomly selected from a student email address list obtained by the Office of Assessment at a mid-size university in the Midwest…

The purpose of this qualitative case study is to capture the perceptions and involvements of African American male students' campus life at a small not for profit PWI in the Midwest to uncover the influences for staying enrolled or leaving the university. African American students who attend four-year PWI of higher education in the United States…

COVID-19 affected various aspects of our life. Many college students were forced to take courses remotely. It was not clear how they adapted to this new environment and how their mental health was affected. The objective of this study is to understand college students' learning experience one year after the outbreak of COVID-19. An online survey…

Since the evolution of the Internet, online instruction has grown significantly and expected to continue. In the United States, 90% of colleges and universities provide online programs to between 6.7 million and 15 million students. Despite the benefits and expected growth of online instruction, researchers have found challenges in this learning…