Demographic and Academic Characteristics of Pell Grant Recipients at Community Colleges
Using data on more than 50,000 community college students who first enrolled during the 2005–06 academic year at one of nine community colleges in three large states, this paper presents demographic and academic characteristics of students who did and did not receive a Pell Grant. The descriptive findings suggest that, despite lower levels of initial college readiness, Pell recipients had a stronger academic focus than non-Pell recipients. Yet, while Pell recipients had higher credit completion ratios and were more likely to complete an award, they were also more likely to be enrolled in the same college with more than 30 credits after five years. This suggests that Pell recipients at community colleges may be taking a longer period of time to complete an academic credential than is prudent.
A Glimpse beyond State Lines: Student Outcomes from WICHE's Multistate Longitudinal Data Exchange Pilot Project.
The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE) is a public, interstate agency established to promote and facilitate resource sharing, collaboration, and cooperative planning among the Western states and territories and their colleges and universities. WICHE's broad objectives are to: • Strengthen educational opportunities for students through expanded access to programs. • Assist policymakers in dealing with higher education and human resource issues through research and analysis. • Foster cooperative planning, especially that which targets the sharing of resources. The Policy Analysis and Research unit is involved in the research, analysis, and reporting of information on public policy issues of concern in the WICHE states. *The U.S. Pacific territories and freely associated states includes three U.S. Pacific territories – American Samoa, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and Guam – and three freely associated states – Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. They join as a single member, with each territory and state electing individually to participate actively in the commission when it sees fit. The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) is the first of the group to participate.
Hedy: A Gradual Language for Programming Education
One of the aspects of programming that learners often struggle with is the syntax of programming languages: remembering the right commands to use and combining those into a working program. Prior research demonstrated that students submit source code with syntax errors in 73% of cases and even the best students do so in 50% of cases. An analysis of 37 million compilations by 250.000 students found that the most common error was a syntax error, which occurred in almost 800.000 compilations. It was also found that Java and Perl are not easier to understand than a programming language with randomly generated keywords, stressing the difficulties that novices face in understanding syntax. This paper presents Hedy: a new way of teaching the syntax of a programming language to novices, inspired by educational methods by which punctuation is taught to children. Hedy starts as a simple programming language without any syntactic elements such as brackets, colons or indentation. The rules slowly and gradually change until the novices are programming in Python. Hedy is evaluated on 9714 programs.