Lawrence2College

High school graduation and college access are critical vehicles for individuals' social mobility and for community change. This chapter provides an overview of Lawrence2College, a culturally engaging service-learning partnership which was initiated in 2014 and focuses on these issues. Lawrence2College facilitates high school achievement and college awareness through a mentoring and support program which connects students from Lawrence High School, a public school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with graduate and undergraduate students from Merrimack College, a private, Catholic college in neighboring North Andover. Lawrence is a city in Massachusetts with a strong Latinx presence, including recent immigrants. Poverty and low literacy are challenges faced by residents. This chapter explains the rationale and conceptual underpinnings of Lawrence2College and describes its evolution and approaches. The chapter concludes with insights and recommendations for practice and research.

Improving Placement Accuracy in California’s Community Colleges Using Multiple Measures of High School Achievement

Objective: Standardized placement tests remain the primary means by which new community college students are assessed and placed in the hierarchy of math and English coursework. A growing body of evidence indicates that placement tests tend to underestimate students’ likelihood of achieving passing grades in college-level courses, leading to students being misplaced in developmental coursework, slowing their academic progress, and increasing their likelihood of dropping out of college. This article discusses the results of a statewide research effort to improve the accuracy of student placement in math and English in the California Community College system. Method: Decision tree methods were applied to high school and college transcript data to identify key measures of high school achievement that predict performance in nine levels of community college math courses (three developmental and six college level) and four levels of community college English courses (three developmental and one college level). Results: Cumulative high school grade point average (GPA) is the most consistently useful predictor of performance across levels of math and English coursework, and a higher GPA is necessary to signal readiness for college-level coursework in math than is necessary to signal readiness for college-level coursework in English. In addition, cumulative GPA combined with specific indications of progress in the high school curriculum is frequently useful for predicting performance in math among direct matriculants and for predicting performance in both math and English among nondirect matriculants. Conclusion: Drawing on the findings, placement rules that colleges can apply directly in their placement processes are developed and validated.

Relationship of Secondary School Mathematics Achievement with Engineering Mathematics 2 in Polytechnics

Engineering Mathematics 2 is one of the core courses for all diploma-level engineering students in Malaysian Polytechnic. From the statistics obtained, students achievement in the Engineering Mathematics 2 course (DBM2013) is still moderate and less satisfactory. This is because the subject of Engineering Mathematics 2 is mostly related to calculus and only students who have taken Additional Mathematics subject during secondary school had a basic in the Engineering Mathematics 2. Thus, this research was developed to see the relationship and influence of Mathematics subject during secondary school level, especially Additional Mathematics with the subject of Engineering Mathematics 2 in Polytechnic. High school achievement was measured using the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) examination results in Additional and Modern Mathematic subjects. Meanwhile, the results in the polytechnic level were measured from the final result of the Engineering Mathematics 2 course. The research used secondary data obtained from the examination unit from 2442 students of Semester 2 of Diploma in Civil Engineering (JKA), Diploma in Electrical Engineering (JKE) and Diploma in Mechanical Engineering JKM) at Polytechnic Sultan Mizan Zainal Abidin (PSMZA). Data obtained were processed and analyzed using Microsoft Excel 2010 and Statistical Packages For Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23.0 through Easy Linear Regression Analysis. The findings from the regression analysis showed that there was a significant positive correlation between the achievement of Mathematics during secondary schools with the achievement of Engineering Mathematics 2 in polytechnics and it also proved that Additional Mathematics is one of the medium for student’s excellence in Engineering Mathematics 2 at polytechnics.

Long-Term Prospects and College Students’ Academic Performance

Self-referent performance beliefs can influence people’s decision making related to long-term goals. Current measures of such beliefs, however, do not explicitly focus on the long-term aspects of goal achievement. We introduce a new concept, Long-Term Prospects (LTP), which is defined as the self-perception that one can maintain the continuous effort needed to achieve long-term goals. We developed a measure of LTP and demonstrated across three studies ( n > 1,900) that college students’ LTP predicted their academic performance, as defined by self-reported grade point average (GPA) and official GPA. Moreover, LTP predicted GPA better than commonly used measures of grit, conscientiousness, and academic self-concept. Multiple regression and Bayesian results showed that LTP accounted for unique variance in the prediction of college GPA above and beyond intelligence, prior achievement, and demographics. Tests for moderation effects suggested that students who had low high school achievement or a low need for achievement especially benefited from having strong beliefs about their ability to maintain effort over the long term. These studies suggest that self-referent beliefs about one’s ability to maintain the effort needed to achieve long-term goals are important for academic success and that the LTP measure captures individual differences in these beliefs. The implication is that cultivating students’ belief that they can maintain long-term effort, especially in low-achieving students, may yield positive outcomes in their academic performance.

Lawrence2College

High school graduation and college access are critical vehicles for individuals' social mobility and for community change. This chapter provides an overview of Lawrence2College, a culturally engaging service-learning partnership which was initiated in 2014 and focuses on these issues. Lawrence2College facilitates high school achievement and college awareness through a mentoring and support program which connects students from Lawrence High School, a public school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, with graduate and undergraduate students from Merrimack College, a private, Catholic college in neighboring North Andover. Lawrence is a city in Massachusetts with a strong Latinx presence, including recent immigrants. Poverty and low literacy are challenges faced by residents. This chapter explains the rationale and conceptual underpinnings of Lawrence2College and describes its evolution and approaches. The chapter concludes with insights and recommendations for practice and research.

Postsecondary Schooling and Parental Resources: Evidence from the PSID and HRS

We examine the association between young adult postsecondary schooling and parental financial resources using two datasets that contain high-quality data on parental resources: the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We find the association to be pervasive—it exists for income and wealth, it extends far up the income and wealth distributions, it remains even after we control for a host of other characteristics, and it continues beyond simply beginning postsecondary schooling to completing a four-year degree. Using the Transition to Adulthood supplement to the PSID, we also find that financial resources strongly affect postsecondary schooling for all levels of high school achievement, and particularly for those at the highest level.