As part of a broad, campus-wide Writing Initiative designed to improve student-writing skills, Fairleigh Dickinson University opened a new campus writing center in fall 2006. Concurrently, a separate component of this initiative was launched to replace the English for General Purposes instruction offered in the traditional English as a Second…

Increasingly, schools have been adopting comprehensive, three-tiered response to intervention (RTI) systems to support students in both academics and social behavior. But with each new systems change initiative comes separate teams, data, and training and coaching systems. Given the intensity of resources required to implement and sustain such…

Autism has a unique history. The definition has broadened and changed over time, from an emotional disturbance with psychogenic origins to a neurodevelopmental disability with suspected environmental and genetic origins. Diagnosis occurs later than children born with obvious disabilities such as cerebral palsy or Down syndrome, but earlier than…

This paper reports the findings of a study conducted to analyse the effect of mobile device intervention for student support services and to gauge its use for enhancing teaching--learning process as a future study in the context of offer of Distance Education programmes. The study was conducted with the learners of the coveted Post Graduate…

In 2009, "Community College Week" named Northeast Alabama Community College (NACC) one of the fastest growing community colleges in America. In the early 2000s, the college, which is located in the rural Appalachian region of Alabama, had begun efforts to increase enrollment. These efforts included providing online registration, online…

Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, a federal program to provide additional assistance to academically struggling students in high-poverty areas, has long contained a provision called the "supplement-not-supplant" requirement. This provision was designed to ensure Title I funds were spent on extra educational services…

Even as the number of students attending college has more than doubled in the past forty years, it is still the case that nearly half of all college students in the United States will not complete their degree within six years. It is clear that much remains to be done toward improving student success. For more than twenty years, Vincent Tinto's…

This report, which was commissioned as part of the Institute for Higher Education Policy's Walmart Minority Student Success Initiative, seeks to highlight how specific institutional policies and faculty-driven, classroom-based practices at Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs) can change in an effort to better support the academic and social…

With older students being the new majority on campus today, it is imperative to understand the experience of adult learners who decide to return to school to complete their degree. The reasons for this surge of older students enrolling in undergraduate degree programs include the need for a more educated workforce as well as the national…

The purpose of this study was to examine the educational services for students with autism in school districts (N = 115) in North Carolina to identify the characteristics and variables that contribute to positive student outcomes. This study used a secondary analysis of data from various resources across the state. Variables included number of…

This phenomenological study examined the transition of a group of adult English language learners from an Adult Basic Education program to a community college. The purpose of the study was to gain a deeper understanding of the driving forces of Adult Basic Education English language learners who had successfully transitioned from a non-credit…

Approximately half of students at the community college level leave the institution before degree completion. Community college students are more likely than four-year students to be first-generation students, attend school part-time, be less prepared academically, work full-time, have family responsibilities, and have entered college later in…

The purpose of this study was to conduct a formative evaluation of the efficacy of the Team Advisory program, an in-school intervention in an urban public high school using fitness to teach study skills and social responsibility, based on the perspective of its faculty (n = 9). The first research question asks what do Boston English Advisors…

First Generation undergraduate students from low-income households (FGLI students) continue to have substantially higher dropout rates than non first generation students or students from more affluent households despite numerous efforts over many decades to improve graduation rates among this group of students. The purpose of this research is to…

How do open and distance learning institutions review and renew themselves to ensure their continued fitness for purpose? Here we report on the work of a change team in the UK Open University, a Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning created to examine, innovate and improve student support. The existence of the Centre for five years from…