Correlates Between Sleep Schedules, Mood and College Performance of Students in Online Education During Lockdown

The current research targeted to establish significant correlations between sleep schedules, mood and college performance of undergraduate students in online college during the pandemic situation. 130 undergraduate students (males and females) between ages of 17 to 21 years from universities across Delhi filled an online survey and the resulting data was subjected to analysis that gave correlations between our three variables. Significantly positive correlations were found between sleep schedules(x), mood(y) and college performance(z). (rxy = +0.538, rxz = +0.562, ryz = +0.744, each significant at p<0.5). These significant positive correlations implied that students having better sleep experienced better mood and college performance, along, better mood leading to a good college performance for undergraduate students and vice versa.

An Examination of Student Success within Canadian Higher Education: Fifty Years of Findings and Recommendations for the Future

This article explores the student success literature published within the Canadian Journal of Higher Education (CJHE) over the last fifty years. Sixty articles were thematically organized into seven component measures of student success to present consistent themes that have persisted within the CJHE from inception in 1971 to 2020. Analysis demonstrates that there has been a disproportionate interest in some aspects of student success such as post-college performance, while other areas such as educational attainment and student engagement have lagged considerably behind in focus. Scholars have presentedongoing concerns supported by a wide range of data regarding the underemployment of graduates from Arts and Humanities, the sparse professorial landscape and the underutilization of Canadian PhD graduates in the workforce, debate on student competence and skill measurement, and the lack of large data sets on student persistence. Results suggest that a continuous effort is required to understand and support student success in a variety of formats—both within the academy and out in the workforce. Thus, this article concludes with a discussion and recommendations for future research avenues in the field of academic success and various subfields that may be of interest to higher education scholars and those who support student success.

Othello as a play-within-the-film in post-independence Indian cinema1

This article aims to explore the appropriation of Othello as a play-within-the-film in three Indian movies: Anbu (Natesan 1953), Saptapadi (Kar 1961) and Ratha Thilagam (Mirasi 1963). Anbu and Ratha Thilagam are Tamil movies, whereas Saptapadi is an example of Bengali cinema. In the three films, the same scene from Shakespeare’s Othello – the murder scene – is performed as part of college theatricals. Although the films immediately associate Shakespeare with education, their appropriation of Othello goes beyond a college performance and provides insight on the main plot. The performance of the murder scene foreshadows the rest of the plot (Anbu and Ratha Thilagam), and explores racial dynamics and miscegenation in relation to the protagonists in Saptapadi. Anbu, Saptapadi and Ratha Thilagam introduce variations to the plot to add new layers of meaning. As the three films are set in postcolonial India, the use of the Shakespearean play inevitably becomes a site of negotiation between colonizers and colonized; the three films negotiate changing controversial political issues across the time period to which they all belong. Anbu, Saptapadi and Ratha Thilagam generate then a new understanding of Othello, which becomes paramount to trace the evolution of Shakespeare in postcolonial India.

Modeling First Year Stop Out of Kalamazoo Promise Scholars: Mapping Influences of Socioeconomic Advantage and Pre-College Performance to College Performance and Persistence

The Kalamazoo Promise (KPromise) is amongst the most well-known and generous tuition-free policies. This study advances the understanding of Promise student performance and persistence. We used a weighted-least square means and variance adjusted (WLSMV) SEM approach and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) to deal with missing data. The main model suggested first-year college GPA (β = –.48) possessed the strongest effect on a first-year stop out followed by socioeconomic advantage (β = –.26), high school performance (β = –.25), immediate enrollment (β = –.22), and KPromise funding (β =.06). Model differences from 06–10 and 11–15 cohorts, illustrate that in the later cohorts socioeconomic advantage’s effect on a first-year stop out lessened.

Information Management and Information System Analysis to Support the Achievement of University Performance Agreements with the Government

State Universities in Indonesia have college performance agreement with Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) that consists of performance indicators and target achievements in a year. For assuring the integration, availability, and data validity of performance indicators, good information management with utilized information system is needed by entire working unit. Information management process to support data collection and target achievements on college performance agreement with MoEC in Brawijaya University still has many deficiencies. The process involves many stakeholders because it covers all areas of business in Brawijaya University (UB). Quality Asurance Center in UB as the unit that collects and processes the data of target achievements complained about data collection that takes a long time and it is often incomplete. The faculties, study programs, and other units experience the unavailability of most data and target performance indicators on information system that is used as reference for implementing business processes. The problem responded lightly by Information and Communication Technology Unit in Brawijaya University with consideration that Information System used is in accordance with the needs of the academic community. On the other hand, the responses about the problem from the lecturers, staff, and students are different. This research tries to explore and evaluate the problem and formulate the steps of transformations to refine the situation by using Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) with some additional Root Cause Analysis (RCA) stages. The major contribution of the research is giving the insights about the problem thoroughly comprising various perspective of stakeholders, transforming the refinement of the situation presented in conceptual model, and the stakeholders’ assessment of the conceptual model. This research also visualizes the implementation of RCA to dig up more perspective of the stakeholders and helps identifying the activities to construct conceptual model.

Raising College Access and Completion: How Much Can Free College Help?

Free college proposals have become increasingly popular in many countries of the world. To evaluate their potential effects, we develop and estimate a dynamic model of college enrollment, performance, and graduation. A central piece of the model, student effort, has a direct effect on class completion, and an indirect effect in mitigating the risk of not completing a class or not remaining in college. We estimate the model using rich, student-level administrative data from Colombia, and use the estimates to simulate free college programs that differ in eligibility requirements. Among these, universal free college expands enrollment the most, but it does not affect graduation rates and has the highest per-graduate cost. Performance-based free college, in contrast, delivers a slightly lower enrollment expansion yet a greater graduation rate at a lower per-graduate cost. Relative to universal free college, performance-based free college places a greater risk on students but is precisely this feature that delivers better outcomes. Nonetheless, the modest increase in graduation rates suggests that additional, complementary policies might be required to elicit the large effort increase needed to raise graduation rates.

A Complete SMOCkery: Daily Online Testing Did Not Boost College Performance

In an article published in an open-access journal, (Pennebaker et al. PLoS One, 8(11), e79774, 2013) reported that an innovative computer-based system that included daily online testing resulted in better student performance in other concurrent courses and a reduction in achievement gaps between lower and upper middle-class students. This article has had high impact, not only in terms of citations, but it also launched a multimillion-dollar university project and numerous synchronous massive online courses (SMOCs). In this study, I present a closer look at the data used in the Pennebaker et al. study. As in many cases of false claims, threats to internal validity were not adequately addressed. Student performance increases in other courses can be explained entirely by selection bias, whereas achievement gap reductions may be explained by differential attrition. It is hoped that the findings reported in this paper will inform future decisions regarding SMOC courses. More importantly, our field needs watchdogs who expose such unsupported extravagant claims—especially those appearing in pay-to-publish journals.

The process of attrition in pre-medical studies: A large-scale analysis across 102 schools

The important but difficult choice of vocational trajectory often takes place in college, beginning with majoring in a subject and taking relevant coursework. Of all possible disciplines, pre-medical studies are often not a formally defined major but pursued by a substantial proportion of the college population. Understanding students’ experiences with pre-med coursework is valuable and understudied, as most research on medical education focuses on the later medical school and residency. We examined the pattern and predictors of attrition at various milestones along the pre-med coursework track during college. Using a College Board dataset, we analyzed a sample of 15,442 students spanning 102 institutions who began their post-secondary education in years between 2006 and 2009. We examined whether students fulfilled the required coursework to remain eligible for medical schools at several milestones: 1) one semester of general chemistry, biology, physics, 2) two semesters of general chemistry, biology, physics, 3) one semester of organic chemistry, and 4) either the second semester of organic chemistry or one semester of biochemistry, and predictors of persistence at each milestone. Only 16.5% of students who intended to major in pre-med graduate college with the required coursework for medical schools. Attrition rates are highest initially but drop as students take more advanced courses. Predictors of persistence include academic preparedness before college (e.g., SAT scores, high school GPA) and college performance (e.g., grades in pre-med courses). Students who perform better academically both in high school and in college courses are more likely to remain eligible for medical school.