Download or read book Evaluating Background Contextual and Motivational Factors that Influence the Persistence and Attrition of College Students written by Jackie C. Thomas and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Retaining and graduating students has become an issue of widespread concern among today's colleges and universities. Current research suggests that, on average, four-year colleges and universities in the United States graduate approximately 58% of their students each year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012). For the past forty years, faculty, staff, and administrators have been interested in identifying factors that may increase the number of students who persist and complete a college degree. The present study used a theoretical model of college student persistence and attrition to test background, contextual, and motivational factors that may influence college student persistence and attrition. Participants in this study were undergraduate men and women (N = 595) who attended a large, diverse, urban, four-year university in Texas. Participants were asked to complete an 84-item online survey that was used to assess the following factors: background characteristics, campus involvement, faculty mentoring, peer group interactions, sense of belonging, utility value, self-efficacy, residential status, enrollment status, transfer status, and financial concern. These factors were used to help predict institutional persistence attitudes, general persistence attitudes, and attrition. Institutional persistence attitudes describe a student's attitude about persisting at the current institution he or she is attending. General persistence attitudes refer to a student's overall attitude about persisting in college. Finally, attrition describes the process in which a student fails to reenroll from the fall 2011 semester to the spring 2012 semester. Results from a series of ANOVAs found that African-American students reported weaker persistence attitudes than White and Hispanic students. Differences in institutional persistence attitudes were also found among students who transferred from another institution and those who did not. More specifically, students who transferred from another institution reported stronger institutional persistence attitudes than those who did not. Interestingly, results of the ANOVAs indicated no differences in institutional persistence attitudes and general persistence attitudes between full-time and part-time students and students who lived on campus and off campus. A pair of hierarchical multiple linear regressions was conducted to evaluate the extent to which student background characteristics, contextual factors, and motivational factors were able to predict institutional persistence attitudes and general persistence attitudes. Results from these analyses indicated that faculty mentoring, parents' education level, socioeconomic status, race, campus involvement, peer group interactions, utility value, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging were all significant predictors of institutional persistence attitudes. In the second multiple regression, gender, race, parents' college expectations, financial concern, utility value and peer group interactions were significantly related to general persistence attitudes. Finally, a subset of the participants (N = 245) who provided the necessary data was used to conduct a hierarchical logistic regression that evaluated the extent to which student background characteristics, contextual factors, and motivational factors could be used to predict attrition. Results from the first step of the hierarchical logistic regression found that prior performance was negatively related to student attrition. The second step of the logistic regression failed to achieve significance. The findings from this study will be used to help educate students, parents, faculty, staff, and administrators about useful strategies and resources that can be utilized to better support and retain college students.

Download or read book Increasing Persistence written by Wesley R. Habley and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: INCREASING PERSISTENCE "Of all the books addressing the puzzle of student success and persistence, I found this one to be the most helpful and believe it will be extremely useful to faculty and staff attempting to promote student success. The authors solidly ground their work in empirical research, and do a brilliant job providing both an overview of the relevant literature as well as research-based recommendations for intervention." GAIL HACKETT, PH.D., provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs; professor, counseling and educational psychology, University of Missouri, Kansas City Research indicates that approximately forty percent of all college students never earn a degree anywhere, any time in their lives. This fact has not changed since the middle of the 20th century. Written for practitioners and those who lead retention and persistence initiatives at both the institutional and public policy levels, Increasing Persistence offers a compendium on college student persistence that integrates concept, theory, and research with successful practice. It is anchored by the ACT's What Works in Student Retention (WWISR) survey of 1,100 colleges and universities, an important resource that contains insights on the causes of attrition and identifies retention interventions that are most likely to enhance student persistence.?? The authors focus on three essential conditions for student success: students must learn; students must be motivated, committed, engaged, and self-regulating; and students must connect with educational programs consistent with their interests and abilities. The authors offer a detailed discussion of the four interventions that research shows are the most effective for helping students persist and succeed: assessment and course placement, developmental education initiatives, academic advising, and student transition programming. Finally, they urge broadening the current retention construct, providing guidance to policy makers, campus leaders, and individuals on the contributions they can make to student success.

Download or read book Completing College written by Vincent Tinto and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 pathbreaking book Leaving College has been recognized as the definitive resource on student retention in higher education. Now, with Completing College, Tinto offers administrators a coherent framework with which to develop and implement programs to promote completion. Deftly distilling an enormous amount of research, Tinto identifies the essential conditions enabling students to succeed and continue on within institutions. Especially during the early years, he shows that students thrive in settings that pair high expectations for success with structured academic, social, and financial support, provide frequent feedback and assessments of their performance, and promote their active involvement with other students and faculty. And while these conditions may be worked on and met at different institutional levels, Tinto points to the classroom as the center of student education and life, and therefore the primary target for institutional action. Improving retention rates continues to be among the most widely studied fields in higher education, and Completing College carefully synthesizes the latest research and, most importantly, translates it into practical steps that administrators can take to enhance student success.

Download or read book Science Attrition Among High performing College Students written by Alexis S. Pope and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presented is a quantitative study on top-performing undergraduate science majors at a mid-size, master’s large, public institution in the United States’ South for the purpose of improving understanding of how motivation to learn science affects a student’s decision to leave or remain in the sciences. The Science Motivation Questionnaire (SMQII) revealed significant relationships to motivation and science attrition in independent samples t-tests and significant demographic patterns were revealed utilizing multiple linear regressions. Science attrition was found to be significantly and negatively related to intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and career motivation levels. Furthermore, selfefficacy levels among female science undergraduates were found to be significantly lower than self-efficacy levels of similar males. Recommendations for retention practices are discussed and areas of future research are suggested.

Download or read book Student Success in College written by George D. Kuh and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-07 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Student Success in College describes policies, programs, and practices that a diverse set of institutions have used to enhance student achievement. This book clearly shows the benefits of student learning and educational effectiveness that can be realized when these conditions are present. Based on the Documenting Effective Educational Practice (DEEP) project from the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University, this book provides concrete examples from twenty institutions that other colleges and universities can learn from and adapt to help create a success-oriented campus culture and learning environment.

Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Understanding the Educational and Career Pathways of Engineers written by National Academy of Engineering and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2019-01-26 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engineering skills and knowledge are foundational to technological innovation and development that drive long-term economic growth and help solve societal challenges. Therefore, to ensure national competitiveness and quality of life it is important to understand and to continuously adapt and improve the educational and career pathways of engineers in the United States. To gather this understanding it is necessary to study the people with the engineering skills and knowledge as well as the evolving system of institutions, policies, markets, people, and other resources that together prepare, deploy, and replenish the nation's engineering workforce. This report explores the characteristics and career choices of engineering graduates, particularly those with a BS or MS degree, who constitute the vast majority of degreed engineers, as well as the characteristics of those with non-engineering degrees who are employed as engineers in the United States. It provides insight into their educational and career pathways and related decision making, the forces that influence their decisions, and the implications for major elements of engineering education-to-workforce pathways.

Download or read book College Student Retention written by Alan Seidman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-08-09 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: College student retention continues to be a top priority among colleges, universities, educators, federal and state legislatures, parents and students. While access to higher education is virtually universally available, many students who start in a higher education program do not complete the program or achieve their academic and personal goals. In spite of the programs and services colleges and universities have devoted to this issue, student retention and graduation rates have not improved considerably over time. College Student Retention: Formula for Student Success, Third Edition offers a solution to this vexing problem. It provides background information about college student retention issues and offers the educational community pertinent information to help all types of students succeed. The book lays out the financial implications and trends of retention. Current theories of retention, retention of online students, and retention in community colleges are also thoroughly discussed. Completely new to this edition are chapters that examine retention of minority and international students. Additionally, a formula for student success is provided which if colleges and universities implement student academic and personal goals may be attained.

Download or read book State of the Art and Future Directions of Smart Learning written by Yanyan Li and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-10-26 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an archival forum for researchers, academics, practitioners and industry professionals interested and/or engaged in reforming teaching and learning methods by transforming today’s learning environments into smart learning environments. It will facilitate opportunities for discussions and constructive dialogue between various stakeholders on the limitations of current learning environments, the need for reform, innovative uses of emerging pedagogical approaches and technologies, and sharing and promoting best practices, which will lead to the evolution, design and implementation of smart learning environments. The focus of the contributions is on the interplay and fusion of pedagogy and technology to create these new environments. The components of this interplay include but are not limited to: Pedagogy: learning paradigms, assessment paradigms, social factors, policy Technology: emerging technologies, innovative uses of mature technologies, adoption, usability, standards, and emerging/new technological paradigms (open educational resources, cloud computing, etc.) Fusion of pedagogy and technology: transformation of curricula, transformation of teaching behavior, transformation of administration, best practices of infusion, piloting of new ideas.

Download or read book Motivation in Online Education written by Maggie Hartnett and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores and explicates learner motivation in online learning environments. More specifically, it uses a case-study approach to examine undergraduate students’ motivation within two formal and separate online learning contexts. In doing so, it recognizes the mutually constitutive relationship of the learner and the learning environment in relation to motivation. This is distinctive from other approaches that tend to focus on designing and creating motivating environments or, alternatively, concentrate on motivation as a stable learner characteristic. In particular, this book identifies a range of factors that can support or undermine learner motivation and discusses each in detail. By unraveling the complexity of learner motivation in such environments, it provides useful guidelines for teachers, instructional designers and academic advisors tasked with building and teaching within online educational contexts.

Download or read book Understanding and Reducing College Student Departure written by John M. Braxton and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-10-07 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Student departure is a long-standing problem to colleges and universities. Approximately 45 percent of students enrolled in two-year colleges depart during their first year, and approximately one out of four students departs from a four-year college or university. The authors advance a serious revision of Tinto's popular interactionalist theory to account for student departure, and they postulate a theory of student departure in commuter colleges and universities. This volume delves into the literature to describe exemplary campus-based programs designed to reduce student departure. It emphasizes the importance of addressing student departure through a multidisciplinary approach, engaging the whole campus. It proposes new models for nonresidential students and students from diverse backgrounds, and suggests directions for further research. Academic and student affairs administrators seeking research-based approaches to understanding and reducing student departure will profit from reading this volume. Scholars of the college student experience will also find it valuable in defining new thrusts in research on the student departure process.

Download or read book Responding to Student Expectations written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2002-09-03 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today’s university students are drawn from a highly diverse set of backgrounds. Students appear in various guises as citizens, consumers, and clients. They are fitting university study around increasingly busy lives, often alongside paid employment ...

Download or read book First generation Students written by Anne-Marie Nuñez and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book International Guide to Student Achievement written by John Hattie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-17 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The International Guide to Student Achievement brings together and critically examines the major influences shaping student achievement today. There are many, often competing, claims about how to enhance student achievement, raising the questions of "What works?" and "What works best?" World-renowned bestselling authors, John Hattie and Eric M. Anderman have invited an international group of scholars to write brief, empirically-supported articles that examine predictors of academic achievement across a variety of topics and domains. Rather than telling people what to do in their schools and classrooms, this guide simply provides the first-ever compendium of research that summarizes what is known about the major influences shaping students’ academic achievement around the world. Readers can apply this knowledge base to their own school and classroom settings. The 150+ entries serve as intellectual building blocks to creatively mix into new or existing educational arrangements and aim for quick, easy reference. Chapter authors follow a common format that allows readers to more seamlessly compare and contrast information across entries, guiding readers to apply this knowledge to their own classrooms, their curriculums and teaching strategies, and their teacher training programs.

Download or read book Self regulated Learning written by Dale H. Schunk and published by Guilford Press. This book was released on 1998-03-20 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text provides a framework for teaching students how to be students, and offers practical guidance on how academic learning, at its best can be brought about.

Download or read book Handbook of the Sociology of Education in the 21st Century written by Barbara Schneider and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-10 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook unifies access and opportunity, two key concepts of sociology of education, throughout its 25 chapters. It explores today’s populations rarely noticed, such as undocumented students, first generation college students, and LGBTQs; and emphasizing the intersectionality of gender, race, ethnicity and social class. Sociologists often center their work on the sources and consequences of inequality. This handbook, while reviewing many of these explanations, takes a different approach, concentrating instead on what needs to be accomplished to reduce inequality. A special section is devoted to new methodological work for studying social systems, including network analyses and school and teacher effects. Additionally, the book explores the changing landscape of higher education institutions, their respective populations, and how labor market opportunities are enhanced or impeded by differing postsecondary education pathways. Written by leading sociologists and rising stars in the field, each of the chapters is embedded in theory, but contemporary and futuristic in its implications. This Handbook serves as a blueprint for identifying new work for sociologists of education and other scholars and policymakers trying to understand many of the problems of inequality in education and what is needed to address them.

Download or read book How Learning Works written by Susan A. Ambrose and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-04-16 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for How Learning Works "How Learning Works is the perfect title for this excellent book. Drawing upon new research in psychology, education, and cognitive science, the authors have demystified a complex topic into clear explanations of seven powerful learning principles. Full of great ideas and practical suggestions, all based on solid research evidence, this book is essential reading for instructors at all levels who wish to improve their students' learning." —Barbara Gross Davis, assistant vice chancellor for educational development, University of California, Berkeley, and author, Tools for Teaching "This book is a must-read for every instructor, new or experienced. Although I have been teaching for almost thirty years, as I read this book I found myself resonating with many of its ideas, and I discovered new ways of thinking about teaching." —Eugenia T. Paulus, professor of chemistry, North Hennepin Community College, and 2008 U.S. Community Colleges Professor of the Year from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education "Thank you Carnegie Mellon for making accessible what has previously been inaccessible to those of us who are not learning scientists. Your focus on the essence of learning combined with concrete examples of the daily challenges of teaching and clear tactical strategies for faculty to consider is a welcome work. I will recommend this book to all my colleagues." —Catherine M. Casserly, senior partner, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching "As you read about each of the seven basic learning principles in this book, you will find advice that is grounded in learning theory, based on research evidence, relevant to college teaching, and easy to understand. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in applying the science of learning to college teaching, and they graciously share it with you in this organized and readable book." —From the Foreword by Richard E. Mayer, professor of psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara; coauthor, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction; and author, Multimedia Learning