Off the Beaten Path: Can Statewide Articulation Support Students Transferring in Nonlinear Directions?

Students who transfer between colleges risk losing credits and decreasing their chances of degree completion. Despite emerging evidence regarding the effectiveness of articulation agreements to address this challenge, it is unclear if these policies support nonlinear transfer pathways—including lateral transfer between 4-year colleges or reverse transfer to 2-year colleges. I use propensity score weighting to examine a statewide articulation agreement in Ohio that established universal credit acceptance for coursework affecting all transfers. Comparing students who completed universally transferrable courses with those who did not, I find no measurable difference in degree attainment among reverse transfers. But there is a positive association with bachelor's degree attainment among lateral transfers, which the findings suggest is related to academic major persistence.

Opportunity for all? The differential impacts of North Carolina’s revised comprehensive articulation agreement by race/ethnicity

Transfer articulation agreements are employed by institutions of higher education and state legislatures alike to improve transfer efficiency between two-year and four-year institutions. These agreements often aim both to increase transfer rates and baccalaureate degree completion and to decrease time to degree. Studies exploring the efficacy of articulation agreements find that, despite being successful at decreasing the number of excess credits students earned at graduation and at increasing baccalaureate degree completion, these policies often increase time to degree. While there is considerable research on articulation agreements, few studies have examined the differential impact of these policies on students of Color who, prior literature has shown, experience barriers to realizing their baccalaureate degree aspirations. The purpose of this study was to examine whether the impact of North Carolina’s statewide articulation agreement varied by a student’s racial/ethnic identity when examining two-year post-transfer baccalaureate degree completion, time-to-degree completion, and excess credit accumulation.

Exploring Influences of Policy Collisions on Transfer Student Access: Perspectives From Street-Level Bureaucrats

States and institutions increasingly rely on articulation agreements to streamline vertical transfer, although the effectiveness of those policies on transfer student outcomes remains unclear. To better understand this effectiveness, we explored a partnership between the College of Engineering at a mid-Atlantic research university and two community colleges located within the same state. We interviewed engineering faculty and academic advisors (i.e., the street-level bureaucrats who implement policy) to explore how an articulation agreement influences processes and policies related to coursework transfer. Our results revealed complexities in the implementation of the articulation policy as it collides with an enrollment management university policy that differs in purpose. Their collision has challenging implications for transfer students and for the faculty and advisors responsible for interfacing with those students.

Experiences with Modelling Early Requirements

A key challenge in the development of systems is the engagement of domain experts in their articulation, agreement, and validation of requirements. This challenge is particularly pronounced at the early requirements phase when multiple stakeholders from different divisions and often different organisations need to reach agreement about the intended systems. Decisions taken at this stage have a profound effect on the technical and economic feasibility of the project. The S3 approach advocates the use of a modelling process expressed in terms of strategy-service-support dimensions, augmented by appropriate simulation techniques that enable experimentation with different scenarios. The S3 approach has been presented elsewhere. The aim of this paper is to provide insights from a large project in which the author played an active and interventionist part, on the utility of the S3 approach in facilitating stakeholder engagement in early requirements specification. The action research for this project involved the design of venue operations for the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. Many tens of stakeholders from a wide spectrum of professional expertise participated in the definition of business support systems for 21 competition venues over a period of 3 years. An interesting feature of this project was the use of three different approaches, starting with traditional peerto- peer knowledge transfer, followed by a typical business process modelling method and finally adopting the S3 approach and the way of working for the entire design of venue operations. The paper offers insights on all three approaches, insights that reflect on the problem of early requirements in general and on the validation of the effectiveness of the S3 approach in particular.

On the evolution of consonant harmony: the case of secondary articulation agreement

Consonant harmony involves long-distance featural assimilation, or agreement, of consonants across intervening segments. Current correspondence-based analyses of such sound patterns assume that they originate in the cognitive exigencies of articulatory planning, either synchronically, through the functional grounding of the constraints responsible, or diachronically, whereby processing factors incrementally shape the lexicon over time. This paper challenges the validity of this assumption as an all-purpose functional explanation for the full range of long-distance consonant agreement patterns by demonstrating that a variety of diachronic trajectories underlies their emergence and evolution. Focusing on the comparatively rare phenomenon ofsecondary articulation agreement, the evolutionary histories of three cases are examined: (labio)velarisation agreement in Pohnpeian (Oceanic), palatalisation agreement in Karaim (Turkic) and pharyngealisation agreement in Tsilhqot'in (Athabaskan). These histories provide explanations for a range of synchronic properties of the systems in question, some of which are problematic for restrictive typologies of consonant harmony.

Meeting the Needs of Rural Students Through Distance Advising: The Role of Transfer Guides in Three Measures of Student Success

Articulation guides for students transferring between Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming and Montana State University-Billings are described. The articulation agreement between the two institutions includes course information and supportive advising for transfer students. We hypothesized that use of the guides would help students weather transfer shock better than those transfer students from community colleges where no guides had been available. The groups' declines in grade-point average (GPA) after transfer, recovery of GPA, and persistence were compared. It was found that the severity of transfer shock and the extent of recovery of GPA were not significantly related to the use of the transfer guides, but ability to persist to graduation was positively related. The format of the transfer guides and corresponding advising activities are detailed. Implications for students and administrators are also discussed.