The Bird’s Eye View of Community Colleges: A Behavioral Typology of First-Time Students Based on Cluster Analytic Classification

The development of a typology of community college students is a topic of long-standing and growing interest among educational researchers, policy-makers, administrators, and other stakeholders, but prior work on this topic has been limited in a number of important ways. In this paper, I develop a behavioral typology based on students’ course-taking and other enrollment patterns during a seven-year observation period. Drawing on data for a population of 165,921 first-time college students, I identify six clusters of behaviors: transfer, vocational, drop-in, noncredit, experimental, and exploratory. I describe each of these student types in terms of distinguishing course-taking and enrollment behaviors, representation in the first-time student cohort, predominant demographic characteristics, and self-reported academic goal. I test the predictive validity of the classification scheme with respect to long-term academic outcomes. I investigate the relationships between the primary classification scheme and several alternative classification schemes. Finally, I demonstrate the replicability of the classification scheme with an alternate cohort of students.     

The Effect of Mobile Support Devices on the Anxiety and Self‐Efficacy of Hospital Float Staff

Floating is the act of staff moving from one unit to another based on the needs of the patients in a hospital. Many staff who float to different units express negative feelings, including anxiety and lack of self‐efficacy. However, floating is an economical and efficient method to use staff across the hospital, especially with current staffing shortages in the United States. This study investigated how the use of mobile performance support devices may help reduce anxiety and increase self‐efficacy for staff who float to different units. With access to multiple resources available on mobile devices, Bandura's social learning theory and self‐efficacy concept set the framework through modeling, observing, and imitating others in order to reproduce certain behaviors and tasks and believe in one's capability to perform. A quantitative study incorporating the retrospective pretest‐posttest design was conducted using the population of float staff, both nurses and respiratory therapists, from Children's Medical Center of Dallas. Both the State‐Trait Anxiety Inventory and General Self‐Efficacy Scale, along with a basic demographic tool, were used to explore anxiety and self‐efficacy in relation to the use of mobile performance support devices. Findings can be used to alleviate the negative feelings of staff toward the idea of floating.