The large rates of students' failure is a very frequent problem in undergraduate courses, being even more evident in exact sciences. Pointing out the reasons of such problem is a paramount research topic, though not an easy task. An alternative is to use Educational Data Mining techniques (EDM), which enables one to convert data from educational…

In France, the university has been experiencing a major crisis for several decades in the form of a high rate of student failure, particularly during the "licence," or first cycle of studies. This prolonged crisis has led educational researchers to focus on the predictors of student failure in University. This paper reviews the existing…

Despite our best efforts as evaluators, program implementation failures abound. A wide variety of valuable methodologies have been adopted to explain and evaluate the "why" of these failures. Yet, typically these methodologies have been employed concurrently (e.g., project monitoring) or to the post-hoc assessment of program activities.…

The issue of high school dropout has long concerned policy makers, educational professionals, and the general public. In the gifted literature, this concern is no less pressing. Student engagement is becoming an increasingly discussed construct for conceptualizing the dropout phenomenon and designing appropriate interventions to prevent this…

This study is based upon a longitudinal analysis of data for a cohort of 181,897 Florida state students who were first time 9th graders in the 2000-01 school year and follows them trough to high school and post-secondary outcomes. Analysis of 9th grade suspension data finds that black students, students who are economically disadvantaged, and…

This paper focuses on predicting drop-outs and school failures when student data has been enriched with data derived from students social behaviour. These data describe social dependencies gathered from e-mail and discussion board conversations, among other sources. We describe an extraction of new features from both student data and behaviour…

In 2007, spurred by University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research (UChicago CCSR) research reports, leadership at the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) began a new targeted approach to reducing course failure in the ninth grade. The research suggested that the transition between eighth and ninth grade played a critical role in shaping…

There is a very large population of students who struggle with the transition from the middle grades to high school, raising concerns that high school failures are partially a function of poor middle grade preparation. As a result, middle grade practitioners are grappling with questions about what skills students need to succeed in high school,…

Research on the validity of psychosocial factors (PSFs) and other noncognitive predictors of college outcomes has largely ignored the practical benefits implied by the validity. We summarize evidence of the validity of PSF measures as predictors of college outcomes and then explain how this validity directly translates into improved identification…

The aim of the present study is to explore a causal model of academic achievement and learning-related personal variables by testing the nature of relationships between learned hopelessness, its risk factors and hopelessness deficits as proposed in major theories in this area. The model investigates affective-motivational characteristics of…

There is a limited literature on academic failure in higher education despite the fact that failure is a common experience among undergraduates. Student and course characteristics were examined in relation to proportions of fail grades assigned in a Faculty of Arts. Concerns had been expressed that combinations of two grades, F (failure to reach a…

Introduction: Premature withdrawal from university due to academic failure can present problems for students, families and educators. In an effort to widen the understanding regarding factors predicting academic success in higher institutions, prior academic achievement measures (preparatory school grade average point (GPA), aptitude test scores,…

The main aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of why students abandon their studies, or perform less well than expected given their high school grades, and to develop predictive models that can help identify those students most at-risk at the time they enter college. This will allow teachers and those responsible for student…

Many educators, parents, and policymakers continue to call for reforms to the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), citing concern about the 10 percent of California students who do not graduate because of their failure to pass the test. By law, current funding for tutoring those at risk of failing the CAHSEE is targeted at those in grade 12…

Little is known about the payoffs to apprenticeship training in the German speaking countries for the participants. OLS estimates suggest that the returns are similar to those of other types of schooling. However, there is a lot of heterogeneity in the types of apprenticeships offered, and institutional descriptions suggest that there might be an…