Critical consciousness, the process by which individuals come to understand, analyze, and take action against systems of oppression, is associated with several positive youth outcomes. However, little research has considered how the core components of critical consciousness (critical reflection, political agency, critical action) are associated…

The purpose of this study was to explore the motivational characteristics and learning behaviors affecting at-risk college students. To explore how motivation and learning behaviors are related to academic achievement, the relationships between (a) self-efficacy; (b) learning and study strategy indicators; and (c) academic outcomes were assessed.…

This study expands on current research that examines the impact of online courses on retention, degree completion, and student success. The researchers investigated the impact of online courses on degree completion by using existing graduation rate data, course enrollment data, and student grades for undergraduate students at a multicampus 4-year…

Virtue education is gaining popularity in institutions of higher education. Given this growing interest, several theoretical accounts explaining the process of virtue learning have emerged. However, there is scant empirical evidence supporting their applicability for intellectual virtue. In this study, we apply a theory of virtue learning to the…

This study investigates the interrelatedness the English as a foreign language demotivation factors of learning difficulties, threats to self-worth, monotonous teaching, poor student-teacher relationships, and learners' proficiency in critical reading and writing. Eighty (n =80) EFL learners participated in the study. The rationale for the study…

This report presents further validation evidence for the Student Subjective Wellbeing Questionnaire (SSWQ). Analyses conducted with a sample of urban middle-school students (Grades 5-8, N = 335) targeted two limitations from previous validation studies: the lack of convergent validity evidence linking responses to the SSWQ with actual school…

This study explored postsecondary trends of Houston Independent School District (HISD) high school seniors over the past three years, including students who participated in direct advising sessions through Launch Senior. Three cohorts of students attended HISD schools in ninth through twelfth grades, culminating in either 2017-2018 (Cohort I) or…

Critical thinking is a learning outcome highly valued by higher education institutions and the workforce. The Educational Testing Service (ETS) has designed a next generation assessment, the HEIghten™ critical thinking assessment, to measure students' critical thinking skills in analytical and synthetic dimensions. This paper introduces the…

Relativizing the popular belief that student effort is the key to success, this article finds that effort in the most advanced mathematics course in US high schools is not consistently associated with college calculus performance. We distinguish two types of student effort: productive and ineffective efforts. Whereas the former carries the…

Institutions of higher education (IHEs) are competing to recruit students in a crowded market with the number of colleges on the increase and the number of high school seniors declining. IHEs are looking for effective ways to recruit students and increase retention and graduation rates. Relationship marketing (RM) is an approach from business that…

This study examined the college entrance examination scores of music and non-music students in the United States, drawing data from the restricted-use data set of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), a nationally representative education study ("N" = 15,630) conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics. Analyses…

Admission to honors programs is competitive and typically relies heavily on the applicant's high school grades and SAT scores. Research shows that of the two criteria, the stronger predictor of performance in an honors curriculum is the high school record, which would imply that grades should receive the greater emphasis. We surveyed current…

Male perpetrated sexual aggression has long been recognized as a serious problem on college campuses. The purpose of this multiple regression correlation study was to assess the relationship between levels of moral development (measured by the Defining Issues Test) and the degree to which first-year college men (N = 161) ascribed to rape…

This mixed-methods study reports psychometric properties of the 34-item Reasoning about P-values and Statistical Significance (RPASS) scale. RPASS is being designed as a research tool to assess effects of teaching methods on students' inferential reasoning. During development (Phase I), two graphical scenarios and 12 items were added to the scale,…

Using a cross-sectional survey, data were collected from 265 first-year college students to determine if parent-student alcohol communication is associated with college drinking or drinking consequences and if this relationship is mediated by students' parental subjective norms, attitudes toward drinking, and perceived risk. Structural equation…