This article reflects on the Kentucky Teacher Internship Program, a program that provides first-year early childhood educators support and assistance from a team of resource teachers, principals, and teacher educators through a year-long supervised internship. It discusses teacher attrition and the need to address issues of teachers' pay and…

During spring 2001, Noel-Levitz created a student loan default model for the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The goal of this project was to identify students most likely to default, to identify as risk elements those characteristics that contributed to student loan default, and to use these risk elements to plan and implement targeted,…

Drawing on Tinto's (1987, 1993) theory of student integration, this research examines students who withdrew from their original institution prior to graduation. Of this group, some of the students who withdraw do so to transfer to another institution, and it is reasonable to assume that these students are different in many ways from students who…

This study focuses on 11 African American undergraduate seniors in a biology degree program at a predominantly white research institution in the southeastern United States. These 11 respondents shared their journeys throughout the high school and college science pipeline. Participants described similar precollege factors and experiences that…

In this article, the author responds to an article written by Chris Whittle, in which he maintains that most of America's education troubles will be over in just a quarter century. The author notes that Whittle's assumptions differ markedly from the available evidence on what works and ignore the complexity of the combined elements of politics,…

A chronic shortage of special education teachers exists throughout our nation and the state of Texas. Most special education teachers leave their positions within their first five years of teaching and the problem of teacher shortages in the field of special education exists throughout South Texas. Texas A&M University-Kingsville, in…

This paper explores the relationships among adolescent leisure activities, peer behavior, and substance use. We suggest that peer group interaction can have a differential effect on adolescent deviant behavior depending on the type of leisure pattern adolescents engage in. We analyze data from a representative national sample of Icelandic…

This chapter discusses how Central Piedmont Community College (CPCC) has used data from the National Community College Benchmark Project. Analysis of project benchmark data led to a review of high course-withdrawal rates and CPCC withdrawal policies as well as their effects on student program completion and within-term retention. As a result, the…

Mastery motivation is an internal drive to master a skill, behavior, outcome, or goal. It has been called persistence, "stick-to-it-iveness" (McCall, 1995), goal-directedness, determination, and tenacity. Mastery motivation is expected to foster development as the child is motivated to learn something new. Parents and other caregivers play an…

Data from two panel studies, the 1993 to 1995 nationwide Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Follow-Up Survey, as well as a 1998-1999 survey of teachers in one western state are used to examine the influence of variables related to demographic characteristics, work assignment, effectiveness, social support, and school management on the…

Analyzing three-year longitudinal data from 18 diverse four-year institutions, this study investigated the role of race in the solidifying plans for a graduate degree. Net of other influences, African American and Hispanic students were significantly less likely than their White classmates to lower their plans for a graduate degree. However,…

Scarcity has been such a constant in education for so long that self-sufficient teachers routinely purchase classroom supplies at their own expense. Sometimes desperate measures are needed to obtain even the most basic equipment. But beyond the lack of material resources are more serious conditions that create an atmosphere of famine, turning…

The research literature on how to retain students until they graduate in post-compulsory education is voluminous and long-standing. However, a unified theory of retention remains elusive. Instead a variety of explanations and approaches has been developed. This article uses one theoretical construct to make sense of the findings of a survey of…

Research reveals that teachers' working conditions are more likely to determine whether they stay at a school--or even in the profession--than are their salaries. Results suggest that policymakers ought to consider selective pay increases, preferably keyed to quality, for work in inner-city schools, together with efforts to improve the working…

Dropping out of school has been presented as a serious problem affecting gifted students, with some authors suggesting that 20% or more of dropouts could be gifted (e.g., Rimm, 1995; Robertson, 1991). Longitudinal data from North Carolina were used to investigate high-school dropout rates among gifted students (N = 7916) who had participated in a…