Education Commons^™

Listening To First-Year Community College Students, Mary Elizabeth Drake

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

First-year community college students are often from underrepresented groups who are unaccustomed to voicing their needs or to being recognized for having more and varied needs than other groups. The purpose of this phenomenological study was to gain an understanding of the factors that may engender or prevent success through listening to what first-year community college students have to say. Research questions addressed what students identified as challenges and successes during their first year and how first person accounts can contribute to the information college personnel need to understand.

Human development theories and models of student persistence informed this study. …

Engaging Community College Students Using An Engineering Learning Community, James Maccariella Jr.

Educational Foundations & Leadership Theses & Dissertations

The study investigated whether community college engineering student success was tied to a learning community. Three separate data collection sources were utilized: surveys, interviews, and existing student records. Mann-Whitney tests were used to assess survey data, independent t-tests were used to examine pre-test data, and independent t-tests, analyses of covariance (ANCOVA), chi-square tests, and logistic regression were used to examine post-test data. The study found students that participated in the Engineering TLC program experienced a significant improvement in grade point values for one of the three post-test courses studied. In addition, the analysis revealed the odds of fall-to-spring retention were …

An Exploratory Investigation Of The Effect Of Racial And Masculine Identity On Focus: An Examination Of White, Black, Mexicano, Latino, And Asian Men In Community Colleges, Frank Harris Iii, Luke Wood, Christopher Newman

Frank Harris III

The relationship between masculine identity and men of color’s focus/effort in community college is examined in this article. Using data from the Community College Survey of Men, the results confirm that conceptions of masculinity for men of color have differential effects on the extent to which students are intensely focused on academic matters. Based on the results of this study, implications for educational practice and future research on men of color in community colleges are discussed.