Inarticulate Transfer: Do Community College Students Understand Articulation Agreements?

Only 25% of community college students transfer to a 4-year institution within 5 years, and only 17% earn a bachelor’s degree within 6 years of transferring (Jenkins &; Fink, 2015). In response, community colleges have partnered with 4-year institutions to draft articulation agreements, outlining transfer policies and procedures for specific academic programs (Montague, 2012). However, no extant research has examined whether these articulation agreements are readable by community college students. This study examines 100 articulation agreements between 2- and 4-year institutions to answer the question: do community college students understand articulation agreements? Findings indicate that 93% of articulation agreements are unreadable by community college students of average reading ability, with 69% of articulation agreements written at or above a 16th-grade reading level. Implications for practitioners and future research are addressed.     

The Student Integration Survey: Development of an early alert assessment and reporting system

This study describes efforts to develop a self-report rating scale (Student Integration Survey: SIS) that provides diagnostic information about students with academic and/or social integration difficulties. Data obtained from administration of the SIS to incoming freshmen at a postsecondary technical institution for the deaf in the fall of 1990 and 1991 were subjected to Rasch rating scale analysis. Fit of data to the measurement model resulted in a set of 28 positive and negative statements that empirically defined the concept of institutional integration in terms of their calibration hierarchy. This type of instrument calibration has the potential of providing person measures and item scale values that are invariant over a useful range of comparisons. The early alert reporting system provides an evaluation and diagnosis of observed responses relevant to expected responses for individual respondees. The substance and methods employed may provide a model for other integration assessment efforts.This research was conducted in the course of an agreement between the Rochester Institute of Technology and the U.S. Department of Education.     

Choosing letter grade evaluations: The interaction of students’ achievement goals and self-efficacy

We examined how achievement (learning and performance) goals and academic self-efficacy predicted three achievement-related outcomes in a college sample. Self-efficacy tended to moderate the effects of (learning and performance) goals on number of courses taken for a letter grade as well as achievement in letter graded and pass/fail courses. Thus, learning goals better predicted choosing letter grades when self-efficacy was high than when it was low. In contrast, performance goals better predicted choosing letter grades when self-efficacy was low than when it was high. Through their prediction of the choice to receive letter grades these interactions predicted achievement in pass/fail courses. In addition, achievement goals and self-efficacy directly predicted achievement in letter graded courses.     

Aversive conditioning of naturally produced reward and nonreward odors in rats

Past experiments have reported that rats encountering reward (R) or nonreward (N) goal events emit odors that can be utilized as discriminative stimuli for instrumental behavior by conspecifics. In the present study, thirsty male rats were aversively conditioned by ingestional toxicosis to R and N odors, and their suppression of water consumption in the presence of these odors was measured. Thirsty trained donors were placed into chambers containing R or N goal events to generate, respectively, the R or N odors. Test animals were given eight differential conditioning trials (four with one odor as CS+; four with the other as CS?), involving placement into an odorcontaining chamber with water available, followed by a LiCl injection on CS+ trials. Animals tested in their CS+ odor consumed significantly less water than did CS? and control subjects. Both R and N odors were conditioned by aversive means and readily discriminable from each other. This represents the first laboratory demonstration of aversive conditioning of such naturally produced odors, and it suggests that aversive conditioning may be useful in the study of odorous emissions generally. Implications for innate meanings of R and N odors are discussed.