This report represents the efforts of a commission of 20 citizens who were directed by the Illinois General Assembly to identify the principal problems in Illinois' elementary and secondary schools and to recommend specific actions for improving the State's educational program. The commission concluded that student learning should be the foremost…

A study was conducted by the Appalachia Educational Laboratory (AEL) to determine impediments to and facilitators of adult students' success during their first semester of attendance at a community college and to recommend interventions which would minimize the difficulties of returning adults as they attempt to manage the learning process. The…

Guilford Technical Community College (GTCC) received a grant to establish a centralized unit for job development, placement, and data monitoring that could serve as a model for the North Carolina Community College System. The first goal of the project was to establish a centralized method for collecting, recording, and maintaining job placement…

Since the 1983 publication of "A Nation at Risk," most states have responded to public demand for educational improvement by enacting legislation increasing the number of units in academic subjects required for high school graduation. Required courses now consume three-quarters of the high school years, countering the former trend to large…

A profile is presented of the social and economic characteristics of black students, 16 years old and over, enrolled in college or a noncollegiate postsecondary institution, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 1976 Survey of Income and Education. After a reviewing of characteristics of the black population in the United States in the…

Abstracts of 76 documents on retention of minorities in higher education are presented in a bibliography created to provide faculty and administrators access to unpublished works and journal articles on minority retention. The materials, which were produced between 1978-1982, include unpublished reports, conference papers, and dissertations.…

A student attrition research methodology and results of attrition research at Barber-Scotia College are examined. Questionnaire responses from 137 students indicated the degree of student satisfaction with academic and social services provided by the college. Data are presented on student enrollments by class during 1970-1980, and on student…

Academic persistence at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) was studied from fall 1979 through spring 1983. Attention was directed to the school's graduation rate and correlations between sex, race, major, grade point average (GPA) and persistence. Of the 1,043 students who were beginning freshmen in 1979, the study sample consisted of…

In order to provide educational opportunities for all students while preventing the "open door" from becoming a "revolving door", Southeastern Community College (North Carolina) established the Resources for Student Learning (RSL) program. During 1976, a comprehensive evaluation of the success and/or reasons for failure of current and former RSL…

Personal contacts students have with their tutors through the telephone tutoring system established at the Open Learning Institute, British Columbia, Canada, were investigated with completing and noncompleting students. Attention was directed to the frequency of contact with tutors and supportive behaviors tutors extend. For the 118 students, the…

A survey was conducted in early 1981 to provide follow-up information on former students of the 14 public community colleges in British Columbia (BC) and of the BC Institute of Technology. In all, questionnaires were mailed to 11,456 persons enrolled in vocational programs at the colleges in September, 1979, but who were not enrolled at any of the…

Undergraduate students enrolled in the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) or the Student Affirmative Action (SAA) program at the University of California (UC), Davis, who withdrew before graduation were surveyed in 1981. Attention was directed to the respondents' educational experiences after leaving, their current employment, and their…

In today's poor economic climate, there is an acute need to coalesce the fragments of research related to student attrition into a systematic program for increasing the chances of student success. Such a unifying program can be visualized on a continuum of retention strategies ranging from impersonal administrative actions to more complicated,…

The volume contains six working papers presented at a 1981 National Institute of Education conference on Indian participation in educational research. The articles are: "A Cross-Cultural Content Analysis of Nez Perce Tribal Legends and Selected Anglo-American Children's Stories for Value-Attitude Factors of Achievement Motivation" by…

Monitoring and subsequently simulating student transfer patterns from one academic major (or level) to another typically enables an institution to estimate future student enrollment distributions across academic areas. At the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC), a student flow model not only simulates the patterns of student transfer but also…