Influences on Community College Students' Educational Plans

This study analyzed data from 285 students attending 5 community colleges to identify the institutional and college experience variables influencing end-of-first-year educational degree plans. Controlling for an extensive array of important confounding influences, the estimated average precollege degree plans of students at the community college one attended had significant, positive total and direct effects on an individual student's end-of-first-year overall educational degree plans and plans to obtain at least a bachelor's degree. In the prediction of end-of-first-year overall educational degree plans, there were significant conditional effects involving sex, race, and precollege degree plans.     

Influences on women's entry into male-dominated occupations

This article focuses on women's entry into male-dominated occupations in the United States. It looks at the impact of Title IX and related legislation which opened access to colleges and universities to women and examines the effects of initial or pre-enrollment student characteristics, organizational attributes of the college of university, student performance and experiences in higher education and the attributes of employing organizations on women's entry into male-dominated occupations. The article concludes with a model for measuring the relative influence of each.     

Validation of a theoretical model of college withdrawal: Interaction effects in a multi-institutional sample

This study investigated the validity of Tinto's (1975) model of college withdrawal in four different types of institutions: residential universities, liberal arts colleges, two-year commuter institutions, and four-year commuter institutions. Analyses were conducted on a sample of 2,326 freshmen from 11 postsecondary institutions. The results generally supported the predictive validity of the model but suggested: (1) that the main-effects influence on persistence of measures of social and academic integration is modest, and (2) that the magnitude of the influence of particular aspects of social and academic integration depended to a significant degree on the characteristics of those students being considered. The theoretical and policy implications of the findings are discussed.     

Reflections of an Evaluator

Using as a case study a major project he directed which evaluated student services in Australian higher education, the author discusses the approach and the methodology adopted. Some difficulties and inadequacies are identified and explained, and the criticisms made by some Victims' of the evaluation are presented. Finally, the paper discusses some issues emerging from the experience of this project in such areas as the politics and climate of evaluation, consultation with and education of the evaluated, the credibility of evaluators, self‐evaluation and the use of external evaluators; and points to some lessons which might be learned.     

Pictorial representations of simple arithmetic problems are not always helpful: a cognitive load perspective

This study examined immigrant parents’ involvement in early years mathematics learning, focusing on learning of multiplication in in- and out-of-school settings. Ethnographic interviews and workshops were conducted in an urban city in Japan, to examine out-of-school practices of immigrant families. Drawing from sociocultural theory of learning and the concept of appropriation (Wertsch, 1998), the role of power and identity was examined in relation to children’s appropriation of an informal multiplication method that was taught by their parents. An intergenerational analysis, between immigrant parents and their children, revealed heterogeneous perspectives towards appropriation. Immigrant parents in this study framed their involvement in their children’s early years mathematics learning in relation to their positional identities and the pressures to conform to the mainstream practices of their host country. During their early years of schooling, students in this study were already aware of academic tracking in the school and were aware of what was believed to be legitimate in school mathematics learning. The significance of diversifying mathematics curriculum and pedagogy was discussed to affirm the knowledge and identities of immigrant students and families.     

An Analysis of the New York State Regents Examinations in Chemistry from 1927 to 1934

Gibbons and Chakraborti's (1991) interpretation of recent simulation results and their recommendations to researchers are misleading in some respects. The present note emphasizes that the Mann-Whitney test is not a suitable replacement of the Student t test when variances and sample sizes are unequal, irrespective of whether the assumption of normality is satisfied or violated. When both normality and homogeneity of variance are violated together, an effective procedure, not widely known to researchers in education and psychology, is the Fligner-Policello test or, alternatively, the Welch t' test in conjunction with transformation of the original scores to ranks.     

Winning at the Publication Game

Prospective authors submitting articles to The Clearing House or other professional journals should realize that publishing success depends, in part, on game strategies. This article by the Executive Editors of TCH identifies ten strategies, based on metaphors from competitive sports, that can help authors win at the publication game.