Higher education yields individual and collective benefits, to include higher earnings, increased civic engagement, and national economic growth. While social and democratic benefits are included in the expansive lists of positive outcomes, economic benefits, both for the individual as well as for society, remain at the forefront of national…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception of employability and success among workforce education and development (WED) graduates. A quantitative study was conducted through the administration of an online survey to graduates (N = 85) of a WED program located within a midwestern, state university. The survey included demographic…

This longitudinal study examines community college students' evolving perceptions on the value of developmental education. Through a series of semi-structured interviews, students described what they perceived of the advantages of beginning their college careers in developmental reading and writing classes. These advantages included becoming more…

Community colleges have made great strides in advancing student success and completion during the last decade. But not all students have benefited from these efforts equally. According to the Lumina Foundation, the postsecondary attainment rate for adults in the United States is around 40 percent. Yet, there are still large gaps in attainment…

As community colleges across the country implement large-scale reforms to improve student success, they need timely and actionable metrics to determine if the changes they are making in a given year or term will likely improve student outcomes in the long run. In this brief, the authors examine how well nine measures of students' progress in their…

Utilizing capital as a construct to analyze leadership that triggers school transformation is a newly emerged perspective. This study employed the capital theory as the framework to explore how schools undertook the transformative tasks by multi-case study. Three secondary schools in Taiwan were recruited to investigate how leaders constructed the…

Cooperative learning is widely recognized as a pedagogical practice that promotes socialization and learning among students from pre-school through to tertiary level and across different subject domains. It involves students working together to achieve common goals or complete group tasks--goals and tasks that they would be unable to complete by…

This chapter reviews ways that researchers have presented variously narrow and broad groupings of special student success programs over the course of decades. Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) is proposed as a way to conceptualize various kinds of community college student success programs as instances of a more general type of program.

The increasing number of students with disabilities enrolling in postsecondary education, and the variety of these disabilities, challenges higher education institutions to meet the unique needs of these students. Academic coaching has been found to be effective in enhancing student success and is one approach that can help meet the needs of…

Instructional leadership is a model of school leadership in which a principal works alongside teachers to provide support and guidance in establishing best practices in teaching. Principals employing this model of leadership communicate with their staff and together set clear goals related to student achievement. In this model, teachers are…

This study examined the relationship between background (race, gender, and Socioeconomic Status SES) of students with Learning Disabilities (LDs) and self-advocacy/self-determination attributes on the impact of their postsecondary education outcomes for predictors of post-school success. Completion at a 2/4-year college/university of students with…

The Community College Pathways initiative is composed of two pathways, Statway® and Quantway® that provide post-secondary students with accelerated means to complete developmental mathematics sequences and attain college-level mathematics credit. Since its inception in 2011, the Pathways initiative has made tremendous strides toward reclaiming…

Significant research has been done on women in STEM, yet there is still much to learn regarding what it takes for Latinas to persist in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. The time has come to find answers to some very poignant questions related to Latinas along the educational pipeline. Exactly, what "does" it take…

This report examines the effects of taking math in 12th grade on several academic outcomes, including high school grade point average, A-G course completion, college enrollment, and college persistence. We also investigate whether particular types of math courses (for example, Calculus or Statistics) are especially beneficial for students'…

This report examines the impact of taking a math course in twelfth grade on L.A. Unified students' science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) college course taking and academic achievement. We also investigate whether particular types of math courses (for example, Calculus or Statistics) are especially beneficial for students' postsecondary…