First-year seminars (FYS) comprise one of 11 researched interventions in postsecondary education known as High-Impact Practices, but few rigorous studies report significantly high impacts. This study examined a FYS employing propensity score matching to link cases and controls in a quasi-experimental design. One semester later cumulative grade…

In the United States high school students may take college level courses that count for credit in both high school and college, often called dual enrollment. Students may take courses at their high school from certified instructors or at a local college. We investigate possible differences between these two groups of students using student level…

Out of over 1.9 million students in the 2018 ACT-tested graduating class, 44% took the full ACT® test at least twice in hopes of improving their scores. Camara and Allen (2017) support this practice, confirming that factors such as time in the classroom between test administrations are associated with increases in ACT Composite scores from the…

As colleges and universities grapple with uncertainty around current and future enrollment as well as increasingly vocal questions about the value of postsecondary education, it is critically important that institutions ascertain and invest in the elements of campus learning and engagement that add value to the undergraduate experience. This study…

With limited budgets and increasing enrollment demands, colleges need fast, free, and practical solutions supporting academic success and retention. The Academic Reality Check (ARC) tool helps to predict traditional freshmen awareness of their own academic expectations in college quickly, supporting the financial investment being made by all…

In this paper we use historic score-reporting records and test-taker metadata to inform data-driven recommendations that support international students in their choice of undergraduate institutions for study in the United States. We investigate the use of Structural Topic Modeling (STM) as a context-aware, probabilistic recommendation method that…

Research on impact in student achievement of online homework systems compared to traditional methods is ambivalent. Methodological issues in the study design, besides of technological diversity, can account for this uncertainty. Hypothesis: This study aims to estimate the effect size of homework practice with exercises automatically provided by…

Multiple choice results are inherently probabilistic outcomes, as correct responses reflect a combination of knowledge and guessing, while incorrect responses additionally reflect blunder, a confidently committed mistake. To objectively resolve knowledge from responses in an MC test structure, we evaluated probabilistic models that explicitly…

Statistics is a difficult subject for many students, but it is also a requirement for most graduate-level business programs. Mastery of difficult subject matter is achieved through repetition. In this article, we review the process for setting up a multiattempt quiz system in an MBA-level introductory statistics course and investigate the impact…

Financing college expenses through an income share agreement (ISA) is an arrangement where the student agrees to pay a fixed percentage of future earned income for a designated period of time in exchange for college funding. Using administrative and survey data for all eligible applicants to a university ISA program, I estimate the adverse…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey, we show that: (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite…

This paper describes the development and efficacy of an online tool for assessing the numeracy of undergraduate students. The tool was designed to be easy to administer, provide immediate feedback to students on whether they had the required level of numeracy, and to be consistent with other measures of adult numeracy. When used with students…

One of the main aims of Core Maths qualifications when they were introduced into the post-16 curriculum in 2014 was to help students develop their understanding of maths and its application to different subject areas, particularly in relation to further study (e.g., higher education). In this article, we explore whether Core Maths is fulfilling…

Social and emotional (SE) skills are known to be linked with many important life outcomes, including academic performance, performance on standardized college entrance exams, and college enrollment, although research on enrollment is limited. In this report, the authors present data points from a study that evaluated test-criterion validity…