Learning outcomes assessment has been widely used by higher education institutions both nationally and internationally. One of its popular uses is to document learning gains of students. Prior studies have recognized the potential imbalance between freshmen and seniors in terms of their background characteristics and their prior academic…

Purpose: Health warnings printed on cigarette packets are an important vehicle in that they demonstrate and inform people of the threats and health risks related to smoking. Increasing the effectiveness of this vehicle is one of the purposes of this study. Research Methods: Since this research aims to describe the associations between dependent…

The authors propose and test a causal model theory of reasoning about conditional arguments with causal content. According to the theory, the acceptability of modus ponens (MP) and affirming the consequent (AC) reflect the conditional likelihood of causes and effects based on a probabilistic causal model of the scenario being judged. Acceptability…

An institution that offers high-quality study abroad programs is perceived as likely to provide a stimulating learning environment for the students (Stroud, 2010). However, there are very few well-designed evaluation studies that provide evidence about the types of impacts of study abroad programs on students' academic and non-academic outcomes.…

As a critical step in understanding the impacts of IB, the analyses presented in this report examined the selection mechanisms behind IB participation across Florida, the state with the second highest representation of IB programs in the nation. We use longitudinal student and school-level data from 1995 through 2009 from the Florida K-20…

Given the increasing costs associated with commercial textbooks and decreasing financial support of public schools, it is important to better understand the impacts of open educational resources on student outcomes. The purpose of this quantitative study is to analyze whether the adoption of open science textbooks significantly affects science…

My dissertation utilizes an explanatory, sequential mixed-methods research design to assess factors influencing community college students' transfer probability to baccalaureate-granting institutions and to present promising practices in colleges and states directed at improving upward transfer, particularly for low-income and first-generation…

This study involved two phases: first when classification was based on the calibration sample, and second in a cross-validation setting. Computer-generated data were used. Results obtained from rules based on probabilities of group membership were compared for accuracy when classifying in the discriminant space and in the predictor variable…