College retention rates are of increasing concern for higher education researchers, administrators, and policymakers alike, and even more so at the community college level. In both human and economic terms, the issue staggers the imagination. As we agonize over the issue, we seem to be neglecting a crucial group of students at the heart of our…

In this quantitative study, a survey was developed and administered to middle and high school teachers to examine what factors motivated them to implement problem-based learning (PBL). Using Expectancy-Value Theory by Eccles et al. (1983) and Self-Determination Theory by Ryan and Deci (2000b) as the theoretical framework, this instrument measured…

The purpose of this study was to further investigate how one successful comprehensive high school serving a large percentage of Latino students builds college-going culture. The study examined two perspectives on college-going culture; that of the school staff (including administrators, school counselors, and teacher leaders), and of…

With the increase in International students coming to the U.S. to study, it is important to look at their experiences and find out more effective ways of improving their perceptions and learning experiences in the U.S. The purpose of this study was to investigate and discover the factors that affect GPA (i.e., academic performance) and persistence…

The purpose of this relational, non-experimental, explanatory, cross sectional study with quantitative methods was to explain the influence of length of school day, if any, on Grade 4 and Grade 5 student achievement in Language Arts and Mathematics as measured by the high-stakes New Jersey standardized test entitled New Jersey Assessment of Skills…

The present study investigated how efforts to enhance career preparation affect peer groups. The participants were 710 9th graders who were randomized into control and intervention groups and assessed 3 times during 1 academic year: at baseline (T1, Fall), immediately after the career preparation intervention (T2, 3 months after baseline), and 5…

The current English programme provided to foundation year students at King Abdulaziz University is failing to equip learners with the desired level of English language. This paper assesses the teaching materials and proposes a teaching framework to improve teachers' lesson delivery. The framework was designed to overcome some of the shortfalls in…

A total of 366 American Indian students in grades 7 through 12 completed the PRIDE questionnaire. Recent alcohol use was reported by 31.9% of students, whereas 26.7% reported frequent episodic heavy drinking. One in three students felt it was harmful/very harmful to use alcohol and less than half felt alcohol was easy/very easy to obtain. A series…

What is the relation between parents' views of their own friendships and their beliefs and practices about their children's friendships? Do parents who enjoy high-quality adult friendships understand and support adolescent friendships in ways different from parents who do not have close adult friendships? Relying on systematic analysis of…

The long-term import of a fundamental challenge of adolescent social development--establishing oneself as a desirable peer companion while avoiding problematic behaviors often supported within peer groups--was examined in a community sample of 184 adolescents, followed from ages 13 to 23, along with parents, peers, and romantic partners. The…

This study investigated how interaction with peers influenced the ways students managed uncertainty during collaborative problem solving in a 5th-grade class. The analysis focused on peer responses to individuals' attempts to manage uncertainty they experienced while engaged in collaborative efforts to design, build, and program robots and…

Across colleges and universities in the United States, few Latino men are reaching higher education. Saenz and Ponjuan call this phenomenon the ''vanishing" of Latino men in higher education. Much of the literature examining the presence of Latino men in higher education utilizes a cultural deficit approach to explain why students of color…

Companions are central to explanations of the risky nature of unstructured and unsupervised socializing, yet we know little about whom adolescents are with when hanging out. We examine predictors of how often friendship dyads hang out via multilevel analyses of longitudinal friendship-level data on over 5,000 middle schoolers. Adolescents hang out…

Using a network analytic framework, this study introduces a new method to measure peer influence based on adolescents' affiliations or 2-mode social network data. Exposure based on affiliations is referred to as the "affiliation exposure model." This study demonstrates the methodology using data on young adolescent smoking being influenced by…

Researchers have become increasingly interested in uncovering how genetic factors work together with the peer environment in influencing development. This article offers an overview of the state of knowledge. It first describes the different types of gene-environment correlations (rGE) and gene-environment interactions (GxE) that are of relevance…