Using data to track and manage student enrollment is steadily becoming a standard practice on both two-year and four-year campuses. Data mining enables colleges to create predictive models for identifying behaviors that put students at risk for dropping out, flag students who engage in these behaviors, and help identify practices that work in…

Colleges increasingly rely on the Web to attract, inform, and interact with students. This makes Web site accessibility and usability critical concerns, particularly for public community colleges, which educate sizable numbers of students with disabilities. As committed providers of postsecondary education to students with disabilities and thus a…

The authors teach upper-level science courses in cell biology, genetics, and biochemistry at a public, four-year "community university" that serves a demographically diverse population of traditional and nontraditional students. In this article, they describe some of the issues they have found to be particularly significant at their "community…

Now it is increasingly critical that community college leaders become involved in network security and partner with their directors of information technology (IT). Network security involves more than just virus protection software and firewalls. It involves vigilance and requires top executive support. Leaders can help their IT directors to…

This paper presents a goal-based scenario approach to teaching introductory database concepts to undergraduates using two different scaffolding methods. One method, termed "worked-out examples," attempts to reduce extraneous cognitive load by requiring students to complete increasingly complex missing parts of worked out examples. The other…

Finding the perfect vendor partner for any campus initiative takes more than patience and planning; it takes an open mind. In the case of the two institutions and their software initiative leaders profiled in this article, a careful assessment of need--coupled with a good deal of out-of-the-box thinking--led to innovative approaches to vendor…

Based on the properties of a Primitive Pythagorean Triple (PPT), a computer program was written to generate, print, and count all PPTs greater than or equal to I[subscript x], where I[subscript x] is an arbitrarily chosen integer. The Density of Primitive Pythagorean Triples may be defined as the ratio of the number of PPTs whose hypotenuse is…

Students in this study were enrolled in either an Introductory Algebra or Intermediate Algebra class taught through computer-mediated instruction or lecture. In the first year of the study, students were asked what they believed helped them learn mathematics in the instructional format in which they were enrolled. They were also asked what they…

The purpose of this study was to examine the status and trends of instruction in both keyboarding and speech recognition among public schools in a Midwestern state. A survey was sent to 490 members of the state business education association who returned 213 (62.5%) usable responses. The subjects represented schools from kindergarten to college.…

Guidance and verbal directions, usually received in a face-to-face (F2F) classroom, are often conspicuously absent from online courses. Like their peers in traditional classroom settings, students in online classes need clear, concise instructions (Cramer, Collins, Snider, & Fawcett, 2006). Screen capture and recording technologies, such as…

This correlation study examined the relationship between gender and the students' attitude and prior knowledge of using one of the mathematical software programs (MATLAB). Participants were selected from one community college, one state university and one private college. Students were volunteers from three Calculus I classrooms (one class from…

The Maui Hawaii Educational consortium (the Maui School District and Maui Community College) sought scientifically based evidence for the effectiveness of the "Cognitive Tutor (CT) Algebra I Curriculum" to inform adoption decisions. Decision makers were particularly interested in whether the use of the "CT" program affects…

This paper examines the use of face-to-face peer review (FFPR) and computer-mediated peer review (CMPR) in an Asian English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) academic writing context. The participants were 33 English majors from a university of science and technology in Taiwan, a new type of school offering 2-year associate degree programs in foreign…

The average age of students at Lake Michigan College (LMC) is twenty-eight years old. In the current study, the application of customized internet assessment for Chemistry 101, Introductory College Chemistry, from 2001 to 2005 is compared with traditional assessment from 1996 to 2000. The authors describe the ways in which computerized assessment…

Researchers in the field of bioinformatics have developed a number of analytical programs and databases that are increasingly important for advancing biological research. Because bioinformatics programs are used to analyze, visualize, and/or compare biological data, it is likely that the use of these programs will have a positive impact on biology…