Maintaining and cultivating student engagement is critical for learning. Understanding factors affecting student engagement can help in designing better courses and improving student retention. The large number of participants in massive open online courses (MOOCs) and data collected from their interactions on the MOOC open up avenues for studying…

Colleges have increasingly turned to predictive analytics to target at-risk students for additional support. Most of the predictive analytic applications in higher education are proprietary, with private companies offering little transparency about their underlying models. We address this lack of transparency by systematically comparing two…

Objective: This study examines how accurately a small set of short-term academic indicators can approximate long-term outcomes of community college students so that decision-makers can take informed actions based on those indicators to evaluate the current progress of large-scale reform efforts on long-term outcomes, which in practice will not be…

The 3-year graduation rate is a rarely measured metric in higher education compared to its 4- or 6- year graduation rate counterparts. For the first time in college (FTIC) students to graduate in three years, they must come with certain skills, abilities, plans, supports, or motivations. This project considers two distinct but interrelated ways of…

Most enrollment management systems today use historical data to build rough forecasts of what percentage of students will likely accept an offer of enrollment based on historical acceptance rates. While this aggregate forecast method has its uses, we propose that building an enrollment model based on predicting an individual's likelihood of…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of proactive student-success coaching, informed by predictive analytics, on student academic performance and persistence. Specifically, semester GPA and semester-to-semester student persistence were the investigated outcomes. Uniquely, the community college focused the intervention on only…

This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

We extend a unified and easy-to-use approach to measurement error and missing data. In our companion article, Blackwell, Honaker, and King give an intuitive overview of the new technique, along with practical suggestions and empirical applications. Here, we offer more precise technical details, more sophisticated measurement error model…