In this study, we develop and implement a text messaging re-enrollment campaign to encourage former community college students to return to college. Former students are randomly assigned to one of two treatment groups that either receives information to simplify the re-enrollment process or receives both information and a one-course tuition…

Current research on employability skills in higher education tends to focus on communication and critical thinking as being key to that success in the classroom and the workforce. The research on active listening, another employability skill, tends to focus on specific college majors. The goal of the present mixed-methods study is to look at how…

Interdisciplinary pedagogy can enhance Introduction to Psychology curricula. We developed an interdisciplinary project to make meaning in a learning community (LC) clustering Introduction to Psychology with Introduction to Criminal Justice. Our purpose is to describe the project as a model and report on students' evaluations of the project and…

Many states are redesigning their college remediation policies to increase postsecondary degree completion. In 2012, Tennessee began waiving college math remediation for high school students who completed a computer-based remedial math course (SAILS) during their senior year. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that the high school…

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading…

Background: Students who transfer from community colleges in pursuit of four-year degrees (i.e., upward transfer students) represent a diverse and talented group that is critical to advancing gender equity in STEM. However, research has not yet explored factors that promote Ph.D. aspirations among upward transfer computing students, resulting in…

CCRC's 2015 book "Redesigning America's Community Colleges: A Clearer Path to Student Success" catalyzed a national community college reform movement. Since its publication, hundreds of community colleges have sought to implement whole-college reforms using the guided pathways model outlined in the book, either on their own or as part of…

A small rural community college implemented an initiative to establish an international program that recruited international students in order to diversity enrollment and to expand the opportunities for cultural competencies though campus internationalization. At first, the international program struggled with international student retention and…

The purpose of this interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) study was to understand the lived experiences and demonstrated resilience of nontraditional, two-year college students from underrepresented populations who have exposure to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and injustice. The intent of this research study was to investigate…

In this paper, we discuss the case studies of two professional development (PD) participants: Nhung Tran and Stella Miller. This data comes from an NSF-funded grant studying inquiry and equity within mathematics instruction at a two-year college. We analyze participant conceptualizations of equity using Gutiérrez' (2009) equity framework. By…

The widening gap between the demographics of faculty and students in higher education is exemplified by the racial, ethnic, and economic disparities in student achievement outcomes. Expecting students to adapt to an unwritten set of rules to successfully navigate higher education is not the solution. Understanding the strengths of students is…

Despite years' worth of focus on improving the success and retention of Black men in community colleges across the nation, an opportunity gap still exists between success and retention rates for Black men and their White counterparts. Much of the research conducted on Black men and their success and retention has been framed from a deficit model,…

The number of transfer students in U.S. postsecondary education has been growing. Of students who transferred from four-year institutions, 52 percent transferred to two-year institutions. Although transferring is an imperative for many students, little about the whereabouts of transfer students is known beyond descriptive statistics. Coupled with…

The geosciences continue to lag behind the other sciences in both diversity and degree completion rates of students transferring from two-year colleges (2YCs). Critical to strengthening the transfer student pipeline is the need to identify who takes introductory geosciences courses at the 2YC level and what factors contribute to increased 2YC…

Objective: We investigate whether performance funding--an increasingly prevalent state policy that allocates appropriations based on outcomes that prioritize retention and completion--places minority-serving institutions (MSIs) at a financial disadvantage due to these institutions serving a greater proportion of historically underrepresented…