Nearly one-quarter of students in community colleges leave school during the first year of enrollment for reasons other than transfer or credential completion. Generally, nontraditional community college students drop out within their first year at higher rates than do traditional students. Using data from Achieving the Dream: Community Colleges…

The Division of Policy, Planning, and Research has assembled the Tennessee Higher Education Fact Book which is a compilation of statistical information pertaining to higher education in Tennessee. This Fact Book contains tables and charts with data relevant to enrollment and transfers, persistence and attainment, and fiscal information about…

Three polytomous DIF detection techniques--the Mantel test, logistic regression, and polySTAND--were used to identify GRE® Analytical Writing prompts ("Issue" and "Argument") that are differentially difficult for (a) female test takers; (b) African American, Asian, and Hispanic test takers; and (c) test takers whose strongest…

This paper describes an intervention program initiated to assist children from disadvantaged backgrounds attain early literacy skills. The pedagogy includes use of play and technology. Data shows significant gains in assessment scores after seven months. Implications for policy and practice are offered. [Note: The footer in this full text article…

In this article, the authors discuss a two-year long professional development research project that took place in the borderlands of the U. S. Southwest and involved a partnership between university and local school district faculty. This intervention project, called Maxima, was designed to positively impact the attitudes and participation of…

In their chapter on numeracy, the authors begin by exploring the many terms used to describe the learning of mathematics by adults. They discuss the relationship between the terms "mathematics" and "numeracy" and explain why numeracy--making meaning with numbers and mathematical processes--is the term they chose for their…

This document describes the rationale and the strategy of the new United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Initiative for literacy: LIFE. The Literacy Initiative for Empowerment (LIFE) is designed as a global strategic framework through which national governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil…

This report documents the process undertaken to produce scales in three cognitive domains: knowing, applying, and reasoning. Included are the final scales showing differences among countries, as well as within countries. TIMSS 2003 is the third and most recently completed round of IEA's Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, a very…

This report investigates the medium-term outcomes of vocational education and training (VET) programs delivered by rural schools for youth and their communities. Former students from six rural school clusters in six states were surveyed, including those who participated in school VET programs and those who did not. Principals and school VET…

The effects of extended time on SAT Reasoning Test™ performance are examined. The study explored the impact of providing standard time, time and a half (1.5 time) with and without specified section breaks, and double time without specified section breaks on the verbal and mathematics sections of the SAT®. Differences among ability, disability, and…

Steele and Aronson (1995) found that the performance of African-American subjects on test items portrayed as a problem-solving task, in a laboratory experiment, was adversely affected when they were asked about their ethnicity. This outcome was attributed to "stereotype threat". Performance was disrupted by the subjects' concerns about…

This study investigated the impact on ethnic, language, and gender groups of a new kind of essay prompt type intended for use with the new SAT®. The study also generated estimates of the reliability of scores obtained using the prompts examined. To examine the impact of a new prompt type, random samples of eleventh-grade students in 49…

In an effort to better understand student loan default behavior at Texas A&M University (TAMU), the research staff at TG, at the request of TAMU, conducted a study of the relationship between loan default, on the one hand, and many student and borrower characteristics, on the other hand. The study examines the default behavior of 12,776…

This report examines college enrollment of students working and/or attending public post-secondary institutions in Texas for the AISD 1997-1998 senior cohort.

In this study of the Accelerated Reader (AR) program, qualitative and quantitative analyses of the relationship between the implementation of AR and student motivation and extent of reading are drawn from data collected in three schools in Scotland and England. These schools represent low (Scotland, n=53), middle (Scotland, n=40), and high…