Initial Academic Momentum and Student Success: Comparing 4- and 2-Year Students

ABSTRACT

Today, many full-time students spend one, two, or more additional years completing a 2-year associate or 4-year bachelor degree. In order to reduce this time frame, many institutions are utilizing a 15 to Finish campaign to encourage full-time students to enroll in 15 credits each semester. The first purpose of this study was to examine if there is a relationship between the number of credit hours enrolled in the first semester and the number of credits earned at the end of the first year. Concurrently, it examined how a student’s initial academic momentum (i.e., the number of credit hours earned in the first year) relates to student persistence and degree completion. The second purpose was to determine if there was a relationship between a student’s socioeconomic status and the number of credit hours enrolled in the first semester—and if it is feasible for low-income students, who primarily attend community colleges, to afford additional credit hours. The results showed that more students who earned 30 credit hours in the first academic year persisted to the second year and earned a degree than students who did not earn 30 credit hours. Also, the results showed that the majority of low-income community college students had enough Federal Pell Grant funds to pay for the additional tuition cost. Given these results, practical and policy implications are discussed.     

The learned function of food-deprivation cues: A role for conditioned modulation

Rats trained in one context to use stimuli arising from food deprivation as discriminative signals for shock were tested in other contexts to assess the basis of conditioned responding (i.e., freezing or behavioral immobility). In Experiment 1, discriminative control by 24-h food-deprivation cues failed to promote transfer responding in a test context that had no association with shock. This indicated that food deprivation cues had little direct excitatory power. However, transfer of behavioral control by 24-h food-deprivation cues was obtained in a context paired with shock only when the rats were 19 h water deprived. This finding agrees with the idea that food-deprivation cues become conditioned modulators of the capacity of external stimuli to activate their association with an unconditioned stimulus. In Experiment 2, rats trained to use 24-h food-deprivation cues as signals for shock exhibited significantly greater transfer performance when the transfer context had undergone partial extinction relative to when the transfer context had undergone only simple excitatory training. This finding with deprivation cues and transfer contexts (1) paralleled earlier results obtained with discrete (auditory and visual) conditioned modulators and transfer targets, and (2) posed difficulties for associative summation and generalization interpretations of transfer performance.     

Black women’s bodies,ideology, and the public curriculum of the pro- and anti-choice movements in the US

This paper explores how opposite sides of the abortion debate employ a discourse of endangerment to mobilise political support for their ideologies about black women’s bodies. I examine the role of black women within that rhetorical strategy through various rhetorical artefacts. To analyse these artefacts, I employ the theoretical framework of ideological or ideographic criticism. This framework helps us see how the artefacts used by both pro and anti-choice movements ‘condition’ the audience not merely to adopt a set of ‘beliefs and behavior, but a vocabulary of concepts that function as guides, warrants, reasons, or excuses for behavior and belief’. Though the two sides of the abortion debate differ in their overt political views, they turn out to share an implicit ideology about black women. This ideology prevents the voices of black women from being heard and valued in a debate that is nonetheless focused on black women’s bodies.     

Economic aspects of post-secondary schooling decisions

This study analyzes post-secondary schooling decisions of high-school graduates using a human-capital framework. Unlike most studies, which consider only college or no school, the current analysis considers the alternative of post-secondary occupational schools as well as four-year and two-year colleges. The model is tested using a multinomial logistic approach on state aggregated data for 1976. Cross-price elasticities reveal that post-secondary occupational schooling is a relevant substitute investment for college. Own-price elasticities have the expected negative sign and income is not found to be a significant determinant of post-secondary-school attendance.     

From traditional to formal education in the lower Arabian Gulf, 1820–1971

This article charts the development of education in the lower Arabian Gulf from its traditional beginnings in the nineteenth century to the provision of more formal schooling and eventually a ministry of education following Britain's withdrawal from the region in 1971. In order to provide a better understanding of the complexities and relative advances and setbacks to this development, special emphasis is placed on the social, economic and political context of education's trajectory; including the lower Gulf's dependent relations with its Imperial protector and its reliance on foreign educational aid from Kuwait.     

Achieving quality education for minorities in mathematics,science, and engineering

The QEM Network was established to serve as a focal point for the implementation of strategies designed to achieve the six goals and 58 recommendations of the QEM Project report,Education That Works: An Action Plan for the Education of Minorities. InEducation That Works, we lay out a vision of a restructured education system that would ensure quality education for, and sustained educational achievement by, minority Americans. We discuss what some of the obstacles are that stand in the way of educational equity in our nation and why it is crucial from both moral and practical perspectives to overcome these obstacles. In a second publication,Together We Can Make It Work: A National Agenda to Provide Quality Education for Minorities in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering, issued in April 1992 by QEM's MSE Network, we lay out a plan for achieving specific goals for minorities in mathematics, science, and engineering. Achieving the goals ofEducation That Works and of Together We Can Make It Work requires that the current K-12 education system be totally restructured. The system we have in place produces only an educational elite that does not include significant numbers of minority students.     

A child's cognitive perception of death

Modern technology and health practices of people today have resulted in people living longer than ever before. Also, the institutions of the hospital and funeral home today make death more physically distant from the child's world. It is not uncommon for the past two generations to have grown up to middle adulthood and not to have experienced the death of an immediate family member (Lerner, 1976). As a result, death today is viewed more as an intrusion on normal reality (Gordan & Klass, 1979).Catherine Goodwin is Special Education Coordinator, College of Human Ecology, The University of Tennessee. Phyllis M. Davidson is Associate Professor, School of Home Economics, Tennessee Technological University.