With a rising demand for a college degree and an increasingly complicated college search, application, and selection process, there are a number of interventions designed to ease the college‐going process for adolescents and their families. One such intervention, the College Ambition Program (CAP), is specifically designed to be a whole‐school intervention that comprehensively connects several important aspects of the college‐going process and specifically is focused on increasing interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). With many adolescents having interest in STEM careers but lacking knowledge of how to transform these interests into plans, CAP supports students in developing and pursuing their educational and occupational goals. CAP offers students tutoring and mentoring, course‐counseling and advising, assistance through the financial aid process, and college experiences through visits to college campuses. In addition to these four core components, CAP is also pursuing how to integrate mobile technology and texting to further provide students with tailored resources and information about the college‐going process. This chapter describes the complexities of the college‐going process, the components of the CAP intervention, and presents findings that demonstrate that these strategies can increase college‐going rates and interest in STEM. The authors highlight the importance of developing a college‐going culture within high schools that support the alignment of postsecondary and career goals.
Objective: Using data from HEIghten® Critical Thinking, a student learning outcomes assessment, the purpose of this study was to evaluate what variables are associated with higher critical thinking performance for students enrolled in various community college programs and to evaluate performance differences across demographic and college-level subgroups as well as student perceptions. Method: With data from 1,307 students enrolled across 34 U.S. and Canadian higher education institutions (72% enrolled in 2-year institutions), we utilized a hierarchical regression to identify variables associated with critical thinking performance. Critical thinking performance differences were evaluated using analyses of variance (ANOVAs) and t-tests across student demographic and college experience subgroups and across student perceptions. Results: Results of this study showed (a) consistent significant predictors associated with higher critical thinking performance; (b) a positive relationship between critical thinking performance and the frequency of using critical thinking in college courses; (c) significant, but relatively small performance differences across demographic and college experience subgroups; and (d) positive relationships between student perceptions and critical thinking performance. Conclusion: This study added to the limited literature evaluating critical thinking skills for community college students. Overall, results suggest that institutions should focus attention to the frequency at which students are using critical thinking throughout their courses, which could increase student performance in this particular area, especially if critical thinking is an explicit outcome within the course. Results also suggested the need to emphasize critical thinking skills more across various community college programs and across non-STEM-focused programs. Suggestions for future research are discussed.
In this research, we developed behaviorally anchored rating scales (BARS) to evaluate the job performance of Zone Three jobs requiring middle‐level skills and prior education ranging from vocational training to an associate's degree as well as work‐related skills or experience. We ultimately identified 7 relevant job performance dimensions mainly based on prior research literature. The dimensions are thought to reflect socioemotional constructs (soft skills, “21st‐century skills”) considered vital to success today in Zone Three jobs. Managers of Zone Three employees helped us develop the final behavioral statements to anchor the 6 BARS points by generating approximately 430 critical incidents on which we based the initial behavioral statements that we wrote. Another group of managers confirmed the relevancy of the statements to the Zone Three workers they supervised, retranslated statements back into dimensions to confirm the dimensions to which they belong, and provided ratings of the effectiveness level that each statement represented. We modified statements to fill any gaps in effectiveness level coverage. Then, we asked leading experts in assessment to confirm the adequacy of the final statements, and after they did so, we created the final anchored scales. Both past literature and our own analyses indicate that these BARS generalize across economic sectors and thus potentially can provide substantial value to organizations that wish to assess, in an efficient and cost‐effective manner, the performance of middle‐skills employees with many different types of possible job descriptions.
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