New Faculty Orientation: Student Retention

Community College Research Center Working Paper No. 54, Feb. 2013. Di Xu speaks about the importance of self-direction for students taking online courses—and how colleges could offer additional support to improve online students' success. Gender, age and ethnicity may impact student success in online courses.

This article presents results from a study testing concept mapping and improved critical thinking skills. Many college students are not progressing in the development of their critical thinking skills. Concept mapping is a technique for facilitating validation of one's critical thinking by graphically depicting the structure of complex concepts.

By: Jenkins, Rob. Chronicle of Higher Education. 3/29/12. Jenkins summarizes the recent studies involving completion rates in online versus f2f classes, and raises concerns that community college students in online courses face a lower completion rate than students at more competitive colleges.

An article published in Online Learning (2016). Online learning continues to grow at post-secondary institutions across the United States, but many question its efficacy, especially for students most at-risk for failure. This paper engages that issue. It examines recent research on the success of community college students who take online classes and explores similar comparisons using 656,258 student records collected through the Predictive Analytics Reporting (PAR) Framework.

This article was published in Journal of Developmental Education (2007). This article describes a 3-year pilot study that addressed persistence and retention of developmental students at a multi-campus community college in the Southwest. The study was conducted as part of a U.S. Department of Education Hispanic Serving Institution grant program.

An article published in International Journal of Continuing Education & Lifelong Learning (2015). The staggering high student attrition rate at community colleges necessitates rigorous studies concerning student retention. Built upon prior research studies, the author of this article proposed a student retention model for community colleges and estimate the association between student retention and various variables.

An article published in Journal of College Science Teaching (2016). Team-based learning (TBL) is an instructional method that has been shown to reduce attrition and increase student learning in a number of disciplines. TBL was implemented in a first-semester general chemistry course, and its effect on attrition was assessed.

An article published in Educational Technology & Society (2014). This article proposes a framework of quality indicators for learning analytics that aims to standardize the evaluation of learning analytics tools and to provide a mean to capture evidence for the impact of learning analytics on educational practices in a standardized manner.