This study examines the change process to enhance student persistence and graduation rates in four North Carolina community colleges. Using a qualitative research methodology, Lewin's change model is presented as a framework to investigate the acceptance and implementation of AtD principles in two community colleges. Processes to enhance student…

A "Capital Commitment" is the five-year strategic plan that sets ambitious targets for the future of DC Public Schools (DCPS). In School Year 2012-13, the first year guided by this plan, student performance hit an historic high. The groundbreaking progress made in year one is promising. This document highlights statistics for this year…

This article focuses on the cross-national relevance of theories of college student departure formulated by U.S. scholars. Some aspects of U.S. developed theories of college student departure hold some semblance of cross-national relevance. Economic and sociological perspectives provide such aspects. The weighing of costs and benefits inherent in…

Several compelling rationales have driven dramatic increases in the number of students that U.S. American postsecondary institutions send abroad each year. The rationales are political, academic, cultural/social, and economic in nature and undeniably integral to developing graduates who are prepared to compete in the global arena. This study was…

Improving student success and degree completion is one of the core principles of strategic enrollment management. To address this principle, institutional data were used to develop a statistical model to identify academically at-risk students. The model employs multiple linear regression techniques to predict students at risk of earning below a…

Undergraduate student attrition is a major concern in higher education. It is usually explained by the impact of student attributes; however, recent developments in student success literature point to the need of exploring institutional practices that may impact a student's decision to abandon their studies. The current weight of academic quality…

In 2005, the graduation rate for the Council Bluffs Community School District was, at 68 percent, the lowest in Iowa. District leaders knew that to improve, they needed to create a cultural change throughout the community. They began by getting community members involved in creating a strategic plan and mission statement that included a guarantee…

This study analyzed the relationships between variables of institutional expenses, library expenses, and library use and variables representing graduation and retention rates for colleges and universities. Using data drawn from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System and the Academic Library Survey, institutions were compared by their…

The study used earliest available student data from a flagship university in the southeast United States to build data mining models like logistic regression with different variable selection methods, decision trees, and neural networks to explore important student characteristics associated with retention leading to graduation. The decision tree…

In Europe and all over the world, higher education systems face the challenge of preparing an increasing number of students for the labor market and teaching them discipline-related knowledge and competences as well as generic competences. But what requirements do higher education graduates actually meet on the labor market? To identify higher…

The purpose of this study was to examine how competency-based learning (CBL) is defined across states in the Regional Educational Laboratory Northeast and Islands region and gain insight into barriers and facilitators to implementation of this reform. Many states in the region have started to consider and implement competency-based learning as a…

Many scholars call for more diverse data on learners' behaviour in CALL (Colpaert, 2012; Fischer, 2007, 2012; Stockwell, 2012). Student retention and the inconclusive efficacy of online language courses (Gaebel, 2013) has received increased attention with the proliferation of MOOCs (Koller, Ng, Do & Chen, 2013). In this paper we introduce…

I investigate the determinants of high school completion and college attendance, the likelihood of taking science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) courses in the first year of college and the probability of earning a degree in a STEM field. The focus is on women and minorities, who tend to be underrepresented in STEM fields. Tracking four…

This study examined the relationship between student engagement and graduation rates between Black/African American students and White (Non-Hispanic) students in their senior year at faith-based institutions in the southeastern region of the United States using the NSSE benchmarks of effective educational practices. Specifically, scores from the…

Imagination in Education was a qualitative inquiry that explored the effects the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) had on imagination within high school cultures. The central question for this study was: How do New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) high school principals conceptualize imagination within their…