Objective: Superiority experiments supply a critical lens to probe higher education interventions because they can dismantle the collective effect of a program and identify the relative contribution of the core components. However, such lines of inquiry are generally absent in higher education literature. We draw on experimental data to probe the…

Community college students often are unaware of the stakes involved in their performance on placement exams, used to sort the students into their first math and English courses. In our randomized experiment of approximately 13,000 newly admitted community college students, we test whether informing students, via a supplemental notification letter,…

Community college students often are unaware of the stakes involved in their performance on placement exams, used to sort the students into their first math and English courses. In our randomized experiment of approximately 13,000 newly admitted community college students, we test whether informing students, via a supplemental notification letter,…

We aimed to compare the findings of three research designs to bracket effect estimates of a strongly worded warning letter delivered by certified mail to students on academic probation. We embedded an experiment within a regression discontinuity design and calculated two achievement estimates, average GPA and percentage of students remaining on…

Community colleges are an increasingly important entry point into higher education for adults in the United States (21st-Century Commission, 2012). Students often hold diverse opinions on and engage in complex meaning-making around the community college institution (Daiute & Kreniske, 2016; Deil-Amen, 2016). Furthermore, students' varied…

There has been a proliferation of student loan debt over the past decade. The indebtedness that students incur while attending college reduces their discretionary income once they enter repayment after graduation. For graduates, there is an opportunity cost along with personal and professional life decisions being made based on this debt. For…

The purpose of this study was to identify the frequency and outcomes of Section 504 and the Americans with Disabilities Act Office for Civil Rights rulings as a result of complaints initiated by students with disabilities against community colleges from 2016-2018. The secondary purpose of this study was to analyze corresponding Office for Civil…

This report concerns actions taken by the administration of Collin College to terminate the services of Professors Lora Burnett, Suzanne Jones, and Michael Phillips. The investigating committee found that the administration's actions involved "egregious violations" of all three faculty members' academic freedom to speak as citizens and…

Responding to the need for recruitment and retention of a diverse geoscience population, we developed a capstone homework assignment for use in introductory-level geoscience courses. In this article we present "Geologic Issues: Community Impacts and Science Communication," a place- and problem-based assignment designed using research on…

The community college continues to deal with the challenging of educating developmental writers. The challenge becomes more daunting with the failure of many to see this as a social and political endeavor. This article delves into the need to teach developmental writing in a way that empowers writers to see themselves as authors and their lives as…

This article describes elaboration in "literary letters" (Atwell, 1984, 1987) written by developmental reading students. Nineteen community college students received instruction in "elaborative thought patterns," or types of elaboration, to improve the quality of their responses to popular fiction. This instruction was part of…

This paper explains how first-year composition students wrote business sales letters about short fiction and then revised those letters into full-fledged literary essays that analyzed the stories. By completing these two writings back-to-back (that is, experiencing the metagenres between business writing and literary analysis), students not only…