The dropout social problem has been the focus of researchers, business and community leaders, and school staffs for decades. Despite possessing significant academic high school capabilities, some gifted students drop out of school. The research problem for this study includes how and why former gifted urban high school students chose to drop out.…

This article illuminates factors predicting students' intention to leave upper secondary school. The research is anchored in an ecological theoretical perspective that considers dropout as a multifaceted phenomenon that culminates in the decision to leave school. Based on this, we have used a longitudinal research design to investigate to what…

Early school leaving is a real social emergency across Europe. Literature and field experience show that the factors leading to the decision to drop out of school are different: family problems, economic distress, territorial discomfort. In addition, there are individual characteristics such as: psychological dimensions, ease/difficulty of…

Higher education today faces a host of challenges, from quality to cost. But too little attention gets paid to a startling fact: four out of ten students -- that's more than ten percent of the entire population -- who start college drop out. The situation is particularly dire for black and Latino students, those from poor families, and those who…

Aggressive students often struggle in multiple domains of their school functioning and are at increased risk for high school dropout. Research has identified a variety of warning flags which are strong predictors of high school dropout. While it is known that aggressive students exhibit many of these warning flags, there is little research which…

Equal access to higher education has for long been a political ambition, however, despite the expansion of the number of students now entering higher education it has not yet been achieved. The present special issue offers insights into the encounter between students from non-traditional backgrounds and higher education. Five individual studies…

In this paper we present an alternative typology for determining success and dropout in massive open online courses (MOOCs). This typology takes the perspectives of MOOC-takers into account and is based on the their intentions and subsequent behaviour. An explorative study using two MOOCs was carried out to test the applicability of the typology.…

Implications for student dropouts include fewer career options and lower earning potential. The purpose of this study was to investigate faculty perceptions of their roles in the student retention process at a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) in the Southeast United States. Guiding the phenomenological study was Lewin's theory of…

Almost from the start of the public schools system in America, students have been leaving school without high school diplomas. However, the dropout issue did not rise to the level of significance it has today until the early 1980s, when social pressures, along with business leaders, leveraged their influence on educators to address the dropout…

Black males face a difficult educational battle. Across America, graduation statistics for Black males are sobering. The purpose of this study was to explore why Black males drop out of school and to examine the current employment status of the study participants. The research took place in rural North Carolina. Fifteen Black American male high…

In recent years, several studies have been carried out into the reasons why students drop out of online higher education, following the rise in the relative weight of this form of education. However, more effort has gone into analyzing the causes of this phenomenon than into trying to characterize students who drop out, that is defining what a…

Evidence in the literature indicates that doctoral candidates may experience increased levels of stress and worry about successfully completing their doctorate degrees. As a result, a significant number of doctoral candidates drop out. In our study with 424 doctoral students in computer science (113 women, 311 men), we ask about the frequency of…

Witnessing violence can negatively affect students' outcomes, but their friendships may mitigate those effects. This study investigated the extent to which seeing someone shot in the last year related to seven school-related outcomes. Additionally, it examined the extent to which prosocial and deviant friends moderate these relationships. This…

Interested in managing existing work-based learning schemes by incorporating monitoring and evaluation methods? Following a brief discussion of the concept of work-based learning, this handbook presents the rationale for monitoring and evaluation as part of good governance. The functioning of work-based learning schemes is represented by a process…

The purpose of this study was to determine whether students enrolled in Secondary (9-12) alternative educational schools, i.e.--district schools vs. charter schools, demonstrate significant differences in achievement as measured by the 2019 A-F Letter Grade Accountability System, as well as to determine whether district and charter schools differ…