Discusses the challenges of maintaining a university culture that embraces engaged scholarship as readily as it does traditional research, using the example of the University of Illinois at Springfield. Explores the difficulties of, and opportunities for, fostering a scholarship of engagement within the context of changes brought on by the…

Author describes four significant themes that highlight adult students' descriptions of how they experience learning on campus. Three themes address the negative side of the experience (sense of impostorship, exclusion from the cultures that have previously defined them, and notion that college will turn their life around). The hopeful theme that…

Describes how Trinity Law School (California) achieves high student retention rates despite obstacles such as the First Year Law Students' Exam, predominantly minority community students, and students who attend while maintaining jobs and families. Emphasis is on the role of the religious model in promoting a sense of community, and on academic…

The purpose of this study was to explore patterns of learning among adult learners in a Web-based learning environment over the study period of one year in the Open University in Tampere and Lohja in Finland. The learning environment varied from face-to-face small group sessions to Web-based online discussion sessions. During this study contextual…

This chapter identifies eleven factors that, when present in a community college, substantially increase the probability that student affairs professionals will be able to create programs that matter to the institution's core mission. The chapter also provides student affairs practitioners with tools to assess the climate in student affairs as…

We tested a theoretical model that hypothesized relationships between several variables from input, process and product in an educational setting, from the university student's perspective, using structural equation modeling. In order to carry out the analysis, we measured in sequential order the input (referring to students' personal…

Leaders at every university agree that educating students in the practice of open-minded inquiry is a key component of undergraduate education, but creating a classroom and wider campus climate that is truly open to multiple perspectives on hot-button political issues is extremely difficult to accomplish. This is true whether the majority opinion…

The purpose of this study was to explore some of the challenges associated with mobile phones in college classrooms. A sample of faculty and students was surveyed to assess the extent to which the technology is considered a serious source of distraction in the classroom, concerns about use of the technology for cheating, and attitudes about…

This article derives from local research at two UK universities as part of their institutional strategies to address retention and progression and enhance their students' experiences of higher education. In both Middlesex University and the University of Salford, research has been undertaken to identify factors which influence the retention and…

This article draws on historical and philosophical lenses and interviews with students to question some fundamental tenets underlying the practice of freshman learning communities (FLCs): that they develop community and improve students' learning experiences. The article brings to the discourse of FLCs some critical questions regarding their value…

The college environment appears to encourage heavy drinking. Consequently, correlates of student drinking were assessed at college entrance. First-semester freshmen (N = 520, 54 percent women) completed self-report measures of social affiliation and self/peer drinking for high school and college. Analyses indicated that: 1) increased drinking at…

This study examined the relevance of higher education institutions' existing student activity programming and its effectiveness in promoting students' multicultural learning. Employing path analysis, this study explored the level of undergraduates' participation in selected college organizations and activities and its linkage to multicultural…

In a world progressing with dizzying acceleration into the Information Age, the slow, measured approach of the traditional university can place administrator, faculty member, and student alike at a disadvantage. To move into this brave new world, the academic animal needs tools. "Beyond 2020: Envisioning the Future of Universities in America" is…

This volume begins with an essay by Noelle McAfee, a contributor who is familiar to readers of Higher Education Exchange (HEX). She reiterates Mathews' argument regarding the disconnect between higher education's sense of engagement and the public's sense of engagement, and suggests a way around the epistemological conundrum of "knowledge…

This research anthology is the fifth volume in a series sponsored by the Special Interest Group-Research on the Education of Asian and Pacific Americans (SIG-REAPA) of the American Educational Research Association and National Association for Asian and Pacific American Education. This series explores and examines the patterns of Asian parents'…