Adults represent a vital and growing undergraduate demographic, bringing diverse experiences and expectations to the educational environment, yet their unique needs are often underserved. Adult learners face challenges beyond attending classes or completing homework (Bellare et al., 2023). This study examines the interplay between satisfaction,…

Purpose: This study examines how and whether expectancy for success and task values influence students' persistence in work placement learning tasks (persistence). Also, it examines the mediating role of task values in the expectancy for success and students' persistence nexus. Design/methodology/approach: This is a two-study finding. In Study 1,…

This quantitative study seeks to explore intrinsic motivation amongst students in post-secondary education. The sample includes 55 undergraduate students currently enrolled in a college of education teaching methods course. The researchers sought to explore the correlation between intrinsic motivation and key variables such as academic…

Though higher education scholars have long known that undergraduate student engagement is associated with student persistence, they have yet to fully unravel its character and how it evolves over time. We argue that this is in part due to the individualistic, static ways engagement is measured even though scholars recognize it as a fundamentally…

This book offers an in-depth look at the experiences of international students as they pursued undergraduate degrees in the US. Drawing on recurring interviews with the students and other qualitative data collected over four years, the book investigates how the students' academic development intersected with other life factors, including their…

Background: Interest in the potential of learning from errors to benefit innovation and organizational and personal growth is currently increasing. In practice, individuals frequently do not appear to learn spontaneously from errors and setbacks without support. Based on prior work, this paper considers antecedents and consequences of adaptive…

Introduction: Student retention is a critical issue in higher education. Universities have responded by implementing supports like early alert systems. Objective: We investigated students' knowledge of and experiences with an early alert system designed to enhance academic persistence. Method: We surveyed (N = 356) undergraduates at a large public…

Social support and academic motivation play an imperative role in university students' success. This study investigated the influence of perceived social support and academic motivation on academic persistence. The participants included 207 undergraduate first-generation black students (FGBS) from a comprehensive university in South Africa (Mean…

This qualitative study explores the roles that undergraduate Spanish as a second language (L2) learners ascribe to their identities, backgrounds, sociocultural contexts, and imaginations in the development of their ideal second language (L2) selves (Dornyei 2009), rooted L2 selves (MacIntyre et al., 2017) and investment (Darvin & Norton, 2015;…

This study examines survey data from 2127 undergraduate women at the 2015 and 2019 American Physical Society Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics (CUWiP) in order to classify what led them to study physics. We use expectancy-value and self-efficacy theory to create a coding framework based on different types of value and efficacy…

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study is to explore how college students from the United States describe the motivational factors that influence them to seek a degree in computer science. There is a gap in the research that shows a need to look at the motivations of women from their first experiences in computer science to begin and…

University agricultural programs' struggle to attract students is leading to a disparity in the number of available jobs in agriculture and the number of qualified applicants to fill these positions. This study sought to garner a unique students' perspective of ways that universities and specifically agricultural programs can support and encourage…

The problem that was addressed through this study is that online undergraduate adult students, 25 years of age or older, do not persist to graduation at Caring University, a pseudonym for an online university. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of online adult undergraduate alumni about what motivated them to…

Kazakhstan prioritizes economic growth and competitiveness through education reforms emphasizing STEM fields. Despite efforts to attract students to STEM, women remain underrepresented. Drawing on human capital and self-determination theory and in-depth interviews with female students majoring in STEM fields, this study examines the motivations of…

Objective: Traditional views of exercise motivation emphasize the long-term health benefits of exercise. We investigated whether mindfulness, present-moment awareness, is associated with greater exercise motivation and exercise self-efficacy in college students. Exercise self-efficacy reflects how confident individuals are that they can persist in…