Effective time management often undergirds students' success in college, and many postsecondary learning centers offer services to help students assess and improve this aspect of their learning skills. In the context of a college success course, we gathered insights from assignments to consider various facets of students' time-related behaviors…

This study examined the degree to which cultural fit (cultural congruity in combination with perception of the university environment) and the dimensional noncognitive processes of mentoring predicted college satisfaction and life satisfaction for 238 racial and ethnic minority undergraduates from two university contexts. Group differences as well…

The study examined whether exposure to spellings of new vocabulary words improved monolinguals' and language minority (LM) students' (n = 25) memory for pronunciations, meanings, and spellings of the words. College students who are native English-speaking monolinguals (n = 12) and LM students who learned English as their second language (n = 13)…

Both community colleges and four-year institutions offer Student Success Courses (SSCs) to promote student engagement (self-regulated learning, SRL) and performance (grades, retention, and graduation). However, little work has been done to examine the holistic impact of SSC interventions or to determine which aspects of course curriculum most…

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that prereading instructions, including how to self-explain during reading, would enhance multiple-text comprehension for college readers. Three prereading instruction conditions included a control condition that provided only the instruction for participants to try to comprehend well; a definition-only…

The Learning Center (TLC) at Mississippi State University (MSU) is an academic support unit designed to help students improve their academic performance. One of the programs offered by TLC is the Learning Skills Support Program (LSSP), which is designed for academically suspended students. The Center has traditionally used the Learning and Study…

Research has shown that skilled college readers use a variety of strategies in flexible ways in order to comprehend academic texts. However, little is known about how skilled college readers use strategies when reading fiction, in spite of the fact that literature courses are required at many universities and thousands of students regularly major…

In this study, we investigated the self-efficacy beliefs and sources of self-efficacy among first-year college students placed in developmental reading courses. Students enrolled in developmental reading were compared to students who were not placed in developmental reading courses in terms of self-efficacy in various contexts and sources of…

Two experiments were conducted with developmental education students to investigate the impact of a contextualized intervention focusing on written summarization and other reading and writing skills. In experiment 1 (n = 322), greater gain was found for intervention than comparison participants on three summarization measures: proportion of main…

A cohort of first-time, full-time, degree-seeking undeclared freshmen at a medium-sized university in Pennsylvania was used to study the relationship between tutoring and the retention rates and decision paths of undeclared students. Undeclared students who did and did not receive tutoring were tracked over four years to determine rate and…

The present study examined the effect of explicit instruction about linguistic hedging on the English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) reading comprehension performance of English Language Learning (ELL) university students through an awareness raising task. A reading comprehension test was developed and validated as the pre-test and…

The effectiveness of a postsecondary strategic learning course for improving metacognitive awareness and regulation was evaluated through systematic program assessment. The course emphasized students' awareness of personal learning through the study of learning theory and through practical application of specific learning strategies. Students…

Teaching mathematics in real-word contexts is a strategy to make math relevant for undergraduate students. However, very little research exists on students' methods of integrating contextual and mathematical knowledge through writing. This study uses an interdisciplinary writing assignment to investigate the relationship between students' written…