The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a peer-taught freshman seminar course on the grade point averages and retention rates of freshman students. Freshman students who entered the University of Texas at Arlington in the fall 1989 and fall 1990 semesters and enrolled in the voluntary 1 credit hour course "College Adjustment" were matched with freshman students who did not enroll in the course. Matched pairs were formed based on orientation attendance, college major, gender, and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores. For both years, the Freshman Seminar Group was similar to the group of All Other Freshman Students regarding the following characteristics: college major, age, gender, ethnicity, SAT scores, and number of first semester hours completed. Analysis of variance was used to determine if statistically significant (p < .05) differences existed between the first semester and first year grade point averages for the Freshman Seminar Group and Freshman Seminar Matches. Chi-square analysis was employed to determine if statistically significant (p < .05) differences existed between the second semester and sophomore year retention rates for the Freshman Seminar Group and Freshman Seminar Matches. The freshman seminar course was more beneficial to African American students, as evidenced by …

The problem of this study involved identifying and ranking perceptions of the attributes of exemplary teaching of adjunct faculty of the Dallas County Community College District. Data was collected by a 75 item opinionnaire and a demographic data sheet which was sent to a population of 3,000 employees of the Dallas County Community College District and 100 exemplary faculty from 39 of the 50 United States. The five chapters were titled Introduction, Review of Literature, Methods, Presentation and Analysis of Findings, and Summary, Discussion, Conclusions, and Recommendations. Revealed through the findings of Chapter 4 was the order of attributes as a Grand grand rank found through the combining of the grand rank order of the Dallas County Community Colleges' employees and the rank order of the nationally recognized exemplary faculty. Findings disclosed that a rank ordering of items represented by Kendall's W at .9654 with a chi-square of 142.8815 at the .001 level of significance. These findings led to the rejection of three null hypotheses and the following related conclusions: (1) perceptions of importance of teaching attributes, can be rank ordered, (2) while a high level of significant values of W may be interpreted as meaning that the observers and …

The purpose of this study was to examine the financial nexus between college choice and persistence for full-time, first-time, first-year freshman college students. The theoretical framework of this study was the financial nexus construct developed by St. John, Paulsen, and Starkey (1996) and Paulsen and St. John (1997). This is the first study to apply the financial nexus construct to full-time, first-time, first-year freshman population; the first to examine baccalaureate/comprehensive and doctoral/research institutions in both public and private sectors separately. The results of this study found that (1) overall, it is slightly evident that there is a financial nexus between college choice and persistence among full-time, first-time, first-year freshman students; (2) the nexus between college choice and persistence may be different by the Carnegie Classification, and (3) the pattern of the direct effects of financial variables (i.e., tuition and financial aid) on persistence was different from the previous results. Unlike in the previous studies, tuition increases appeared to have a positive effect on the enrollment of full-time, first-time, first-year freshman students attending institutions of all Carnegie Classifications. The result suggests that price may reveal a "quality effect" and that higher tuition institution may signal higher quality. In both public and …

The study was undertaken: (a) to categorize the contents of educational computing articles using a taxonomy developed by Knezek, Rachlin, and Scannell (1988), (b) to examine the trends in educational computing subject matter addressed in community/junior college journals between 1977 and 1991, and (c) to identify and analyze specific characteristics of contributing authors and their employing institutions which might explain writing and publication biases.

The purposes of this study are to determine the extent to which nursing education administrators accept the use of an adapted Montessori method in teaching basic nursing skills and to determine the feasibility of implementing such a method.

This study tries to delineate the paradigms of opinion among Colombian Computer Industrialists with respect to the role of informatics in national development especially (1) their estimation of the performance of the informatics in the modernization process, (2) the perceptions on which this attitude was based, (3) their ability to integrate the informatics instruction into the development process, (4) their ability to establish the need of doctoral programs in informatics into the development process, and (5) their ability to recognize the importance of the network communication as a medium of knowledge exchange among higher education institutions.