Instructors are increasingly using interactive student response systems (SRS) to foster active learning and deepen student understanding in statistics education. Yet most studies focus on either the benefits of SRS or on how "students" can receive and use feedback, rather than on how "instructors" can use formative assessment…

More than half of states have implemented tuition-free college policies aimed at reducing attendance costs and incentivizing enrollment. We review the academic literature on the design features and impacts of these tuition-free policies, and we analyze an initiative Virginia implemented in 2021 called Get a Skill, Get a Job, Get Ahead (G3), which…

This dissertation examined the decision-making experience of students receiving an early alert notification at a community college and what influenced students' responses to the alert. Early alert programs are identified as a high impact persistence practice and may involve significant financial, technology, and personnel investments. Examining…

This study was born out of a concern that U.S. community colleges were currently using or considering using noncognitive variables for academic placement without an understanding of how students would react to these scales in a high-stakes setting. While the use of noncognitive variables for placement often stems from a desire to overcome the…

Although active learning improves student outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs, it may provoke anxiety in some students. We examined whether two psychological variables, social anxiety (psychological distress relating to the fear of negative evaluation by others) and academic self-efficacy (confidence in…

The number of community college students reporting mental health disorders increased from approximately 40% to 49% between 2014 and 2016. Peer-to-peer mental health support, for example, recognize and refer, initiatives have utility for promoting college student mental health on four-year universities. The potential efficacy of peer-to-peer mental…

Purpose: This research was intended to identify some of the factors that impact student veterans' well-being, based on their unmet needs. Research by the USC School of Social Work Center for innovation and Research on Veterans & Military Families USC-CIR (2015) found that many service members separate from the military ill-equipped to begin…

This author's reading selection for his class provoked an unexpected response: when one of the main characters in the reading "came out of the closet," the students divided themselves into those who were willing to discuss the issues, and those who weren't.

Like many colleges across the United States, Pipe Lake Community College (PLCC), (a pseudonym) has experienced a dramatic increase in enrollment of Latina/o students and is considered an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). Other than Santiago & Andrade's (2010) survey, little research has been conducted on emerging HSIs. Also, little…

Each year college students in America spend approximately $5.5 billion on textbooks. With each student spending roughly $900 on books assigned by professors, are these dollars being well spent and are students receiving a fair return on their investment? More importantly, do these texts serve the integral function in the courses as described in…

In this article, the author discusses how instructors' feedback on their students' texts can exact a toll on the students. Based from her own experiences, the author relates that teachers often do not have enough time to grade their students' writing. Even so, she argues that teachers like her should adopt strategies that promote self-reflective…

This recently completed study examined whether attribution theory can explain helping behavior in an interdependent classroom environment that utilized a cooperative-learning model. The study focused on student participants enrolled in 6 community college communication classes taught by the same instructor. Three levels of cooperative-learning…

Encouraging students to be more vocal members of the response sequence can assist teachers in writing stronger comments on student texts. The author conducted a small-scale study of students' reactions to response formats, finding that students preferred formats that allowed teachers to elaborate on their comments, displayed teacher effort,…

At the University of Akron, the administration decided to segregate the students previously called "provisional" from the "regular" population. As an open-access institution, the university directly admits only approximately 15 percent of the students to a program of study. The vast majority of students start in University College and transfer to…

While teaching basic reading to students at a two-year college, the author had the idea to introduce his students to texts as challenging as the traditional material, but less complex. In doing so, he hoped to tap into the students' high competency in "street literacy"--the ability to decode the visual signs that are omnipresent in popular…