The field of deafblind (DB) education has a long and rich history which includes a lack of qualified personnel to meet the needs of the population of learners. In addition, the literature base is small, lacking evidence for effective practices or methods of assessing and tracking growth with these learners. The ability to adequately track student…

Institutions of higher education must include policy-informing research into their long-term retention planning to improve institutional practices regarding student support and persistence (Bean, 2001; Kuh, 2006; Brown, 2015). This information is needed to make institutions of higher education aware of how student characteristics interact with the…

Games contribute to the whole-person, academic, and career development of college-aged individuals (Alderman, 2015). However, many higher-education institutions do not sponsor gaming as a collegiate extracurricular activity, thereby possibly eliminating the opportunity of an all-inclusive environment (Alderman, 2015). To elucidate the problem,…

Preparation for and application to medical school, as well as the subsequent medical training of matriculating students, can have an important impact on psychosocial development. The premedical baccalaureate is the traditional preparation for medical school, although many medical schools also offer a separate entry path through early assurance…

Historically, retaining students and maximizing their academic achievement has been a challenge for administrators in American colleges and universities. Since the mid-twentieth century, the sophomore year has increasingly been suspected of being a gateway to declining grades, decreased morale, and increased attrition among college students.…

Using an innovation adaptation of the gap analysis approach of Richard Clark and Fred Estes, the collegiate First-Year Experience (FYE) consisting of comprehensive and intentional curricular and co-curricular initiatives was examined. Conceptualization and operationalization of the goal for a FYE program was based on 3 student development theories…

Service-learning is an instructional method designed to cultivate interaction between students and their communities in order to improve the learning process. Although there is a wealth of information available pertaining to the development and implementation of service-learning in higher education, evidence supporting the impact of…

Higher education student leadership development programs have grown exponentially since the 1990's. Over this time, research has indicated that student leadership development programs are beneficial; however, the research on what makes these programs effective has not kept pace. The subjects of this study included students enrolled in three…

Students with moderate intellectual disabilities (MoID) typically are not taught decoding skills because they have difficulty mastering critical blending skills. In response to this skill deficit among students with MoID, an "Initial Phonics" instructional sequence was created that included student development of rapid and automatic retrieval of…

This quantitative research study measured self-reported spirituality of student affairs professionals, practices of student affairs professionals in regard to integration of spirituality into their work, and predictors of holistic, spiritually-infused practice of student affairs professionals. The independent variables were demographic and work…

The notion that an ethic of service can be fostered through participation in an academic community engaged service-learning program was the underlying premise for this program evaluation study. The purpose of this program evaluation study, using both quantitative and qualitative measures in a thoughtfully organized setting of university and…

The first year of college is critically important to student success, often shaping the amount and nature of growth and learning over the entire collegiate career in complex and profound ways. For this reason, higher education experts have called for colleges and universities to establish integrated, intentional programs for new students with…

Because of national, state, and local accountability to prepare students to be college and career-ready, secondary schools are looking for ways to maximize student academic growth while in high school. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation between academic growth as measured by the changes in performance from students' 8th…

"I think what I learned in the IB [International Baccalaureate] program...well, in a way I felt like--have you read Great Expectations? When Pip gets the stipend from the mysterious person and he's walking out and the clouds are lifting up and he can see all the possibilities--that's how I felt with the IB program." -Student reflection…

At the university level, introductory science courses usually have high student to teacher ratios which increases the challenge to meaningfully connect with students. Various curricula have been developed in physics education to actively engage students in learning through social interactions with peers and instructors in class. This learning…