The cost of higher education at both public and private institutions is increasing and adversely affecting college students (College Board, 2009; Idemudia & Ferguson, 2014a, 2014b, 2015a, 2015b). Utilizing an institutional dataset called Financial Survey of Students 2006 compiled at one of the largest public universities in the southwestern…

The course withdrawal decision includes both monetary and time costs for the student. Institutional costs include the misallocation of scarce seats to noncompleting students. Understanding the course withdrawal decision process can aid advisors and administrators as they seek ways to improve retention and progression. This study uses 21,318 course…

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) provide educators with an abundance of data describing how students interact with the platform, but this data is highly underutilized today. This is in part due to the lack of sophisticated tools to provide interpretable and actionable summaries of huge amounts of MOOC activity present in log data. To address…

The Einstein-First project approaches the teaching of Einsteinian physics through the use of physical models and analogies. This paper presents an approach to the teaching of quantum physics which begins by emphasising the particle-nature of light through the use of toy projectiles to represent photons. This allows key concepts including the…

Taking risks and enjoying challenges are fundamental to the lives of young children from a developmental and evolutionary point of view. However, in modern societies, increasing concern about dangers and injuries has led to the escalation in regulation and provisions for the safety of young children. This intent to establish secure and risk-free…

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been proposed as a promising approach for the classification of students into different levels of a psychological attribute hierarchy. Unfortunately, because such classifications typically rely upon internally produced item response patterns that have not been externally validated, the instability of ANN…

This study investigates whether the completion of an optional sandwich work placement enhances student performance in final year examinations. Using Propensity Score Matching, our analysis departs from the literature by controlling for self-selection. Previous studies may have overestimated the impact of sandwich work placements on performance…

A majority of high school graduates aspire to earn a college degree (ACT, 2016), yet many students are graduating from high school unprepared to do college-level work. As a result, about one-third of college freshmen enroll in at least one developmental course upon entry to college (Skomsvold, 2014). Because developmental courses are often not…

Rural communities are not a monolith; they have unique challenges that require unique policy solutions. One of the best ways to understand the diversity of those challenges -- and, in turn, identify the most effective solutions -- is to hear directly from rural communities. This Special Report analyzes data from a 2020 Strada Education…

Postschool outcomes of youth with intellectual disability (ID) continue to trouble practitioners and scholars. The purpose of this study was to analyze postschool engagement outcome data for 360 survey respondents with ID in South Carolina in the areas of employment and postsecondary education/training. Specifically, we examined the relationship…

We present a multiple-choice test, the Montana State University Formal Reasoning Test (FORT), to assess college students' scientific reasoning ability. The test defines scientific reasoning to be equivalent to formal operational reasoning. It contains 20 questions divided evenly among five types of problems: control of variables, hypothesis…

Only half of SAT-takers retake the exam, with even lower retake rates among low income and underrepresented minority (URM) students. We exploit discontinuous jumps in retake probabilities at multiples of 100, driven by left-digit bias, to estimate retaking's causal effects. Retaking substantially improves SAT scores and increases four-year college…

We investigated whether high-skill readers skip more words than low-skill readers as a result of parafoveal processing differences based on reading skill. We manipulated foveal load and word length, two variables that strongly influence word skipping, and measured reading skill using the Nelson-Denny Reading Test. We found that reading skill did…

In this paper, the dice game "Unders and Overs" is described and presented as an active learning exercise to introduce basic probability concepts. The implementation of the exercise is outlined and the resulting presentation of various probability concepts are described.

Two experiments tested how the "functional form" of the causal relations that link features of categories affects category-based inferences. Whereas "independent causes" can each bring about an effect by themselves, "conjunctive causes" all need to be present for an effect to occur. The causal model view of category…