The purpose for conducting the study was to describe the community, personal experiences, and life events of individuals from rural Arkansas communities in developing their decisions to attend college and how the community impacted their successful enrollment at the University of Arkansas. Specifically, the study set out to explore how rural…

Student success is a movement mobilizing various community college stakeholders to make policy and institutional change. More recently, researchers, policy leaders, and other community college stakeholders suggest expanding definitions of student success to include community college student post-graduate labor market outcomes, as community college…

A student's sense of understanding is extremely important as it relates to school inclusion, connectedness, and overall success. However African American and Latino students, who are subjected to higher rates of school removal than other student populations, are placed in alternative settings, and as a result, experience difficulty reintegrating…

Professional development in higher education is increasingly shifting to online formats. However, online professional development often does not lend itself well to fostering meaningful human interconnection. Taking a constructivist approach, we share findings from a qualitative research study that explored what participants found meaningful in a…

Institutions of higher education are environments of civic engagement, with a special responsibility of fostering participation among members and involvement in the community. Yet, a common issue is a definitional one. Scholars and practitioners have debated what counts as college student civic engagement, with as many definitions as participants…

The COVID-19 pandemic was a unique phenomenon that significantly impacted higher education. Programmatic grants were an important source of funding at community colleges during this unusual time, helping to provide vital resources and support services to institutions and their students. This study is one of the first of its kind to explore the…

A significant contributor to student success is engagement in the school setting. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) can be a helpful framework for increasing student engagement and creating an inclusive environment for all learners. This study investigated the relationship between teachers' understanding and implementation of Universal Design…

Mandatory community college student fees have risen steadily over the past 20 years, outpacing the growth of tuition by a substantial margin. To date, research on postsecondary fees has been limited to public four-year colleges and universities, even as community college fees are growing faster and affecting students who are likely more price…

This explanatory design was used to develop and implement effective Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) at Target Elementary School (TES). The theoretical framework for this study began with the assumption that there was a direct link between PLCs, student data, and self-efficacy of educator collaboration. It should be the goal of every…

The advising experience of students who start their academic studies at a community college is often critical to their success. Students with an intent to earn an associate degree may find that academic advising helps them define their academic goals, affirms their educational plans, and provides them continual guidance. This study explored the…

Current student success measures have been shown to be necessary, but insufficient, often masking the successes of specific student populations by virtue of their 4-year institutional centricity, aggregate calculation, and reflection of hegemonic definitions of student success. For far too long, academics and policymakers have valued what they…

The rapid spread of COVID-19 during the spring of 2020 warranted an unprecedented change as faculty were required to convert course content and quickly learn to use new instructional technology in order to prepare for emergency remote teaching. The purpose of this qualitative case study is to explore how faculty experienced this sudden disruption…

The role of intrusive advising in the persistence of community college students has not been well-studied even though intrusive advising has been touted as a practice to improve retention in U.S. community colleges. Student retention is important for sustaining community colleges that serve as open admissions institutions because they are…

Data science programming presents many challenges for programmers entering the field. Roughly, data science programming can be broken up into several activities: data wrangling, analysis, modeling, or visualization. Data wrangling is an important first step that involves cleaning and shaping tabular data--or dataframes--into a form amenable for…

Community colleges provide a key point of access to higher education across the United States. These colleges are especially important for underprepared students, especially in mathematics. This is especially true of rural students, who often have lacked the access to educational resources. Research on growth mindset theory has provided promising…