Math courses serve as cornerstones to most, if not all, community college programs. Yet, these courses continue to be gatekeepers. Contextualization represents a promising venue through which instructors might break down math barriers for students. This study explores community college students' learning experiences in contextualized math classes,…

The purpose of this qualitative, descriptive scientific phenomenological study was to explore what it is like for a community college student to experience group dynamics in a team-based gamified learning environment in the Southwestern U.S. Although the student or "player" experience is at the center of a gamified curriculum, it is not…

Understanding students' participation in collaborative classroom settings is important in a variety of educational contexts, with implications for teaching, research, and equity. Using data from a group-centered developmental mathematics class, this research brief illustrates novel quantitative representations of students' group participation and…

One major challenge that institutions face when launching transformation efforts is that they operate in "silos," meaning that they have separate departments--for example, student services, financial aid, and advising--that operate independently with little communication or coordination. Many successful transformation efforts include a…

While e-technology plays an important role in education, there have been some countries that have not yet utilized e- technology to reform their education goals and meet the global standards as other advanced countries. As of today, in many less developed countries such as Iraq, faculty members support traditional styles of teaching and do not…

Over the course of their work at the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) the authors observed that their students had an especially hard time functioning well in groups, in the context of both video production and media studies classes. An example of the latter is Introduction to Contemporary Media (MES 152). This paper looks at…

The purpose of this case study was to understand how attending an undergraduate academic conference contributes to a student's sense of belonging, not only within their institution but also in the larger academic community. This research was informed by the literature on club participation in conferences and faculty/student connections. Through…

The goal of the study was to assess the effects of gender on college students' perceptions of the cooperative learning process. Ninety-five college students completed 5 open-ended questions that asked students about their preferences for cooperative learning activities. Fifty-one female and 44 male students participated in the study. Utilizing…

Immersive technologies have the potential to play unique roles in the collaborative problem-solving process. To advance research in these contexts, new methods of documenting group collaboration with technology are necessary. The goal of this paper is to develop and utilize a coding scheme that enables investigation of the nature of collaborative…

Decision making at the upper echelons of community colleges is often influenced by an individual's cognitive biases. Cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias, can also influence how effective an individual perceives the group decision-making process. The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between an individual's…

A growing national focus on prison reform has led to a resurgence of interest in carceral education. However, and although college education prison is different from college education in the community, relatively little scholarship has explored why or how these variations exist, what they mean, or how they have changed over time. The present paper…

A classic belief of the university as a place of public discourse (Arendt, 1979) without the need for close emotional connections (d'Entreves, 2019) is being challenged. As American colleges progressively evolve into large pluralistic societies that are interacting in transnational ways (Sweeny, Weaven, & Herington, 2008) across mass…

This dissertation study was guided by two research questions: (1) What shapes community college mathematics faculty members' set of racialized ideologies, beliefs, and attitudes that inform their behaviors and teaching practices in the virtual classroom?; and (2) How do the racial and virtual classroom dynamics shape the ways mathematics faculty…

Because of the importance of faculty engagement to achieve our nationwide student completion goals, this paper comprehensively and critically reviews the conceptualizations of faculty and employee engagement in the extant literature. This review is a means to develop an improved, more inclusive, faculty engagement framework. It is a framework that…

Project-based learning (PBL) instructional methods attempt to make connections between students and their ability to solve real problems. We framed our qualitative study within sociocultural theory and used the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) model to define the positive and negative factors occurring during a PBL…