Grit, the personal characteristic of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, plays a vital role in college students' success and well-being. This study aimed to investigate the contribution of optimism (a personal factor) and college mattering (a social factor), as well as their underlying mechanism on grit among college students. Data was…

This dissertation examines the relationship between teacher retention and student perceptions of school climate in an urban school district, both in individual school years and across multiple school years. This secondary analysis uses a school-level measure of teacher retention from New York City (NYC) public schools and measures of school…

Persistence in distance learning has become problematic. This quantitative nonexperimental study examined whether perceived connectivity, perceived internal locus of control, and age predict persistence in online master's degree programs. Rotter's locus of control theory, Moore's transactional distance theory, and Rovai's composite persistence…

This article will address predictors of success for online students. A survey questionnaire was used to gather data concerning online students' social and educational readiness levels at a four-year private university in the Midwestern United States. Of the 4,050 potential participants, 250 (6.23%) responded to the survey. Stepwise regression…

Parents' beliefs about the nature of ability are communicated to their children through parent-child interactions. Parental mindsets are one of the parental beliefs that have received increasing attention over recent years. However, their role in children's motivation and achievement outcomes remains relatively underexplored. Moreover, most…

The retention of high-achieving students in a university honors program is a significant challenge for academic institutions. This dissertation evaluates how well an honors college at a large, urban, public university retains students in the Honors College. The evaluation is a mixed-methods utilization-focused evaluation conducted by an internal…

Data were collected from 289 undergraduate college students at a minority-serving institution to explore the impact of academic rational beliefs on grit and resilience. Findings from hierarchical regression analyses suggested that academic rational beliefs related to evaluation and work habits accounted for a significant amount of variance in…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the degree to which character strengths can predict grade point average (GPA), in comparison with and over and above the established predictors of grit, self-control, and conscientiousness. The current study was based on the work of Boerma and Neill (2020), who examined the relationship between…

Background: Although most engineering colleges offer a variety of co-curricular and extracurricular activities to enrich students' sense of belonging to the college, existing literature has not fully captured whether and how the various activities serve to support students' sense of belonging and predict student outcomes. Purpose: We investigated…

Copious research on Social Cognitive Career Theory has found student self-efficacy substantially related to persistence in engineering programs. The present exploratory study investigated the associations among faculty encouragement (a specific type of verbal persuasion in college context) and students' self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and…

Purpose: This study aims to advance the understanding on individual variations in PhD candidates' personal interest in their doctorate and supervisory and research community support, and several individual and structural attributes potentially having an impact on the profiles. Design/methodology/approach: The authors explored the interrelationship…

In developed countries, obtaining a job qualification is a requirement for securing worthwhile employment. Given, it leads to better social and economic conditions during the entire working life. One relevant avenue to facilitate access to a job qualification, especially for students who have school concerns, is to encourage students to take…

There is a dramatic increase in the number of mainland Chinese students coming to Hong Kong to attend various courses. With the aim of developing a profound understanding of the adaptation of the mainland Chinese students (N = 210), this study tested the relationship between types of motivation and goal content when studying abroad with a wide…

Grit is among the individual difference (ID) variables that have recently come to the attention of researchers investigating second language acquisition. While some empirical evidence has been accumulated, it is clearly scant and limited, also because of the fact that many studies have looked into domain-general grit rather than this attribute as…

Despite the significance of grit and motivational regulation strategies (MRS) to language learning, limited research has been conducted on their longitudinal interplay. The present study explores the relationship between these two constructs in an English as a second language (L2) learning context through a longitudinal design. This study utilizes…