Student Decisions to Attend Public Two-Year Community Colleges

While the strategy of funding both systems provides an incentive for both school districts and community colleges to participate with dual enrollment, the current fiscal environment has drawn attention to the inefficient use of the dual funding structure. This article highlights the results of a case study on Florida's dual enrollment program documenting how over a 20-year period policymakers offered different financial incentives as an inducement to greater participation among districts and community colleges. The article documents how the current state fiscal condition has altered lawmaker's motivations for supporting dual enrollment. It concludes by describing the implications of this on community college participation with dual enrollment.     

Evaluating the Influence of an Urban High School Reform Effort on College Readiness and Access Outcomes: A Quasiexperimental Cohort Study

It is widely accepted that postsecondary education has become a necessity for US youth. College access, however, has been found not to be equal for all. As a result, federally funded college-readiness programs, such as Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP), have been established to increase the numbers of economically disadvantaged students with access to college. This quasiexperimental case study compared academic and nonacademic college-readiness indicators between cohorts of GEAR UP students and nonparticipants in 1 urban high school. Overall, cohorts of GEAR UP students outperformed their non-GEAR UP peers on all measures (grade-point average, attendance rate, behavior, graduation rate, and college enrollment) despite a dramatic demographic shift that led to greater proportions of educationally disadvantaged students in the GEAR UP cohorts.     

On Going (Way) Beyond One’s Data: A Proposal to Restrict Recommendations for Practice in Primary Educational Research Journals

To counteract what we see as a growing research-reporting concern, we propose the following editorial-policy change regarding the content of primary research articles in educational research journals: Contributors should restrict their discussion and conclusions to their data and not offer recommendations for educational practice nor speculate about the educational policy implications of their research. We believe that this change will be beneficial for maintaining a separation between evidence and opinion concerning the legitimate warrants of empirical research. We suggest viable accompaniments and alternatives to authors offering practical recommendations and policy speculations in primary-research journal articles. Among these is to rely on all sources of evidence, including systematic research syntheses based on the aggregated contribution of multiple research studies from different sources, with recommendations for practice tailored to specific situations so that both their validity and utility will be increased. It is hoped that our proposed policy change will initiate a conversation among researchers, editors, reviewers, and educational-policy experts with respect to the scope and purpose of primary research journal articles.     

Editorial for EAIT issue 3, 2021

Education and Information Technologies -