In recent times, Educational Data Mining and Learning Analytics have been abundantly used to model decision-making to improve teaching/learning ecosystems. However, the adaptation of student models in different domains/courses needs a balance between the generalization and context specificity to reduce the redundancy in creating domain-specific…

In this dissertation, I use data from Chile to study the determinants of schooling trajectories. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on higher education, Chapter 3 on secondary education, and Chapter 4 on teachers. Chapter 1 explores the role of a socio-emotional ability, self-efficacy, in understanding why students with comparable qualifications transit…

Recent research has highlighted the critical problem of high rates of "disconnected youth"--youth and young adults who are neither employed nor in school. Practitioners, scholars, policymakers, and a range of stakeholders express mounting concern that disconnected youth are a societal burden that costs countries trillions of dollars.…

Student engagement is a key predictor of academic performance, persistence and retention in higher education. While many studies have identified how aspects of the college environment influence engagement, fewer have specifically focused on emotional intelligence (EI). In this study, we sought to explore whether EI could predict cognitive and/or…

Research points to several determinants of the private demand for higher education, which include individual, social, economic, and institutional variables. Of these variables, economic factors are considered to be highly relevant, especially in the current financial crisis. The paper investigates the link between expected rates of return to…

This study leverages human capital theory to identify the correlates of expected returns on investment in higher education at the level of institutions. We leverage estimates of average ROI in post-secondary education among more than 400 baccalaureate degree conferring colleges and universities to understand the correlates of a relatively new…

To improve students' transitions between successive educational levels, continuing learning pathways are being designed and implemented in many countries. This study was carried out to examine the effects of the Green Lycea (GL) as critical cases of continuing learning pathways in vocational education in The Netherlands. The GL were compared with…

We study the impact of socio-economic status on enrollment and study decisions in higher education. We use a discrete choice approach to distinguish between three channels. First, students from disadvantaged backgrounds may be more sensitive to the costs of education. Second, they may have lower preferences for education. Third, they may have…

Learning to program is a complex task, and the impact of different pedagogical approaches to teach this skill has been hard to measure. This study examined the performance data of seven cohorts of students (N = 1168) learning programming under three different pedagogical approaches. These pedagogical approaches varied either in the length of the…

Presented at the national conference for the American Educational Research Association (AERA) in 2010. This presentation examines the relationship between academic self-beliefs and outcomes.

The purpose of this study was to investigate if there are differences in how cognitive and noncognitive variables predict academic performance for college students with learning disabilities. In particular, this study examined the extent to which the cognitive variables of high school grade point average and SAT (combined verbal and math) or ACT…

The purpose of this study was intended to examine the inner voices behind the students' choices of American higher education and their persistence in college in relation to financial factors, especially the student financial aid programs and their debt burdens during and after college. Case studies were used to answer the three research questions:…

The challenge of translating equity of access into equity of outcome with students from a differentially resourced secondary education system which may have advantaged or disadvantaged them in demonstrating their academic ability in the conventional matriculation/national senior certificate (NSC) examinations necessitated that Universities…

This paper attempts to harness the opportunities for mobility and the new user interfaces that handheld touch screen devices offer, in a non-formal learning context, with a view to developing spatial ability. This research has addressed two objectives: first, analyzing the effects that training can have on spatial visualisation using the…

The educational benefits of a diverse student body are clear. However, in order to reap the benefits associated with a diverse student body, campus leaders must create a campus environment that is welcoming and affirming, and fosters cross-cultural interactions. Student affairs professionals are uniquely positioned within the university to be…