Compared to its predecessor, "Answers in the Tool Box," the preponderance of the "Toolbox Revisited" story has been on the postsecondary side of the matriculation line. Implicitly, it calls on colleges, universities, and community colleges to be a great deal more interventionary in the precollegiate world, to be more self-reflective about the…

This article analyses interim findings of an ongoing action research project into the use of assessment criteria and grade descriptors in the assessment process. The project is multidisciplinary and covers areas as diverse as Sports Sociology, Economics, Youth and Community Studies, and Education. The idea is to equip first-year students with the…

Strengths-based advising is proposed as a new lens for higher education, one that enables advisors to see diverse groups of students fulfill their potential and achieve excellence. Based on research from social work, positive psychology, and the business world, this approach enables advisors to identify and build on the inherent talents students…

This study examines the career development behavior of Asian international, non-Asian international, and domestic students, specifically the certainty of career and major choice and environmental factors that have influenced their choices. Environmental factors include family, school counselors, teacher, friends, and government. The results show…

Attrition in weight loss programs is a complex process, influenced by patients' pretreatment characteristics and treatment variables, but available data are contradictory. Only a few variables have been confirmed by more than one study as relevant risk factors, but recently new data of clinical utility emerged from "real world" large observational…

"School refuser" is an always-already negative child identity. The term is used to categorize children or adolescents who appear to dislike and fear school (or aspects of school) and persistently refuse to attend or attend very unwillingly. Given that school attendance is generally considered a necessary social good, regular and anxious…

The Gulf Coast Association for Institutional Research (GCAIR) conducted a study of those concurrent/dual credit (CDC) students enrolled fall semester, 2001. The purpose was to determine a profile for this group of students which included gender, ethnicity, GPA, re enrollment, etc. Since there has been little research done on these students,…

This article reports on an investigation into the motivations of a cohort of pre-service teacher education students, undertaking a five-year, full-time combined undergraduate and initial teacher education degree program at the University of Sydney, Australia. Participants completed an extensive questionnaire which sought to gather data on the…

As a result of their mission to provide services to diverse groups, community colleges generally have lower retention rates. The present research reviews the theoretical basis of retention, with a focus on summarizing how the theory pertains to two-year schools. While numerous variables influence persistence, a student's educational objectives…

The central theme of this article is that teachers' professional development in England is not being taken as seriously as it needs to be. With reference to the induction of newly-qualified teachers and the early professional development pilot schemes, it draws on data from several related pieces of research, to argue that cases of…

This article explores the transience and mobility of teachers working in an isolated community: a secondary school in regional Australia. Drawing on parent, student, and teacher interviews, we ask: how should we understand these teacher commitments to schooling and how does this influence parents' and students' commitments and understandings of…

Single equation regression models have been used to test the effect of Supplemental Instruction (SI) on student retention. These models, however, fail to account for the two salient features of SI attendance and retention: (1) both SI attendance and retention are categorical variables, and (2) are jointly determined endogenous variables. Adopting…

Biracial students represent a growing number of students on many campuses and an increasingly significant segment of the population of the United States. Nevertheless, this group of students rarely has been studied with respect as to how their experiences affect persistence at colleges and universities. This case study reports on the experiences…

This paper describes a school/university graduate induction program that has provided support to beginning teachers since 1994. A 10-year follow-up study of program graduates was recently conducted to examine these questions: (a) How many graduates are still in the education profession? (b) How many have remained in the classroom? and (c) What are…

Existing applications of event history modeling in attrition research typically focused on the first departure. This study extends the scope of existing applications by dividing each student's enrollment history into periods of enrollment and non-enrollment (spells). The findings indicate that departure is strongly associated with poor college…