This qualitative hermeneutic phenomenological study explores the lived experiences of first-at-institution female community college presidents in the United States, focusing on the social influences they encountered. Despite community colleges serving a large number of female, underrepresented, and low-socioeconomic students, leadership roles are…

First-generation college students are a prominent higher education student population and are well-represented at the community college. Unfortunately, many first-generation community college students do not persist for degree completion. These students face many academic and social challenges that impact their persistence. However, research has…

Young adults today are the least happy demographic group, departing from a long-established U-shaped relationship between life satisfaction and age in many countries worldwide. The longstanding U-curve reflects the unhappiness and stress that most people experience in the midlife years as they juggle financial and family constraints while both the…

Using a positive psychological framework, Broaden-and-Build Theory, we investigated whether and how positive and negative emotions (affective factors) and cognitive flexibility are related to flourishing. Participants are 151 bilingual adults from diverse backgrounds enrolled in a local community college. Results showed that both positive and…

The author investigates the learning efficiency of economic experiments, an innovative instructional tool that re-creates the outside world within the classroom. This tool enables the instructor to create an economic environment whereby students experience how their decisions and interactions create the market forces predicted by the economic…

Whereas Kindergarten through Grade 12 teachers go through extension education and training to teach, it is rare for a college faculty member to go through training on how to teach. Since there is little research about higher education faculty professional development, the purpose of this study was to learn the perspectives of college faculty who…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to explore how promise students describe their social integration via their interactions with faculty and peers in college success courses at a community college in California. Tinto's Student Integration Theory was used to address two research questions: how promise students describe their…

This research examined the experiences of Filipinx California community college alumni involved in a Filipinx learning community within the last 5 years. This research explored the influencing factors leading Filipinx students to join Filipinx learning communities and how Filipinx culture and the concept of family was incorporated within the…

Diminishing student attitude toward the student evaluation of teaching (SET surveys) and its correlational effect on reduced survey response quality is a major concern. The use of SET to assess instructors for promotion and tenure extension is common and yet controversial in institutions of higher learning. As students become subjected to multiple…

This dissertation examined how adult learners who took developmental mathematics in a community college and passed the courses, viewed their self-efficacy and the roles they felt self-efficacy had on their successful completion of mathematics. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 10 adult learners in two U.S. community colleges.…

Prospective technicians for elderly care are indispensable elements that should be included in the relevant system to meet the ever-increasing care needs of the aging world population and increase the quality of care. This research was conducted to evaluate the attitudes of students in the elderly care program at the associate degree toward the…

Evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) have been shown to benefit students in undergraduate biology, but little is known about the degree to which community college (CC) biology instructors use EBIPs or the barriers they encounter. We surveyed CC biology instructors to characterize how they use EBIPs, their capacity to use EBIPs, and…

This study aimed to investigate the differences in learners' emotion, cognitive load, and cognitive performance among various scaffolding DGBLs, and the influences of emotion and cognitive load on cognitive performance when using DGBLs. Participants were 97 adult learners from some community college, randomly divided into the control group with 32…

Social relationships in the school context -- particularly teacher-student relationships and peer relationships -- are related to students' positive attitudes toward school, and consequently are of great importance regarding various aspects of learning and instruction. This can be concluded from studies that examine the influence of social…

The purpose of this qualitative research study was to illustrate the experiences of transfer students interacting with community college librarians for instruction and research assistance. This research study was guided by one research question: (RQ1) How do transfer students at community colleges who frequently meet with their community college…