Suchergebnisse

"College completion and college success often lag behind college attendance. One theory as to why students do not succeed in college is that they lack key information about how to be successful or fail to act on the information that they have. We present evidence from a randomized experiment which tests the effectiveness of individualized student coaching. Over the course of two separate school years, InsideTrack, a student coaching service, provided coaching to students from public, private, and proprietary universities. Most of the participating students were non-traditional college students enrolled in degree programs. The participating universities and InsideTrack randomly assigned students to be coached. The coach contacted students regularly to develop a clear vision of their goals, to guide them in connecting their daily activities to their long term goals, and to support them in building skills, including time management, self advocacy, and study skills. Students who were randomly assigned to a coach were more likely to persist during the treatment period, and were more likely to be attending the university one year after the coaching had ended. Coaching also proved a more cost-effective method of achieving retention and completion gains when compared to previously studied interventions such as increased financial aid"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

AbstractPre‐college advising programs exist in most disadvantaged high schools throughout the United States. These programs supplement traditional advising by high school guidance counselors and attempt to help underrepresented and disadvantaged students overcome the complexities of the postsecondary admission and financial aid processes. Existing evidence on these programs often uses within‐school randomization where spillovers and alternative supports may confound estimates. We provide the first evidence on a whole school intervention resulting from a school‐level randomized controlled trial in the United States. The college access program we study uses a near‐peer model where a recent college graduate works at the school assisting students in the application and enrollment process. Pooled results across the first three years of program implementation find no significant impacts on overall college enrollment. However, subgroup analyses reveal positive, significant effects among the groups most targeted by the intervention: Hispanic and low‐income students. Most of the impact comes through increasing two‐year college enrollment, but this appears to be new entrants rather than inducing students to move from four‐year to two‐year colleges. The observed positive effects for these subgroups attenuate over time. We attribute this drop in the estimated impact to departures in fidelity of the experiment. Even among the cohorts for which we find positive enrollment impacts, we find no significant impacts on college persistence.

AbstractPeers affect individual's productivity in the workforce, in education, and in other team‐based tasks. Using large‐scale language data from an online college course, we measure the impacts of peer interactions on student learning outcomes and persistence. In our setting, students are quasi‐randomly assigned to peers, and as such, we are able to overcome selection biases stemming from endogenous peer grouping. We also mitigate reflection bias by utilizing rich student interaction data. We find that females and older students are more likely to engage in student interactions. Students are also more likely to interact with peers of the same gender and with peers from roughly the same geographic region. For students who are relatively less likely to be engaged in online discussion, exposure to more interactive peers increases their probabilities of passing the course, improves their grade in the course, and increases their likelihood of enrolling in the following academic term. This study demonstrates how the use of large‐scale, text‐based data can provide insights into students' learning processes.