INCREASING PERSISTENCE "Of all the books addressing the puzzle of student success and persistence, I found this one to be the most helpful and believe it will be extremely useful to faculty and staff attempting to promote student success. The authors solidly ground their work in empirical research, and do a brilliant job providing both an overview of the relevant literature as well as research-based recommendations for intervention." GAIL HACKETT, PH.D., provost and executive vice chancellor for academic affairs; professor, counseling and educational psychology, University of Missouri, Kansas City Research indicates that approximately forty percent of all college students never earn a degree anywhere, any time in their lives. This fact has not changed since the middle of the 20th century. Written for practitioners and those who lead retention and persistence initiatives at both the institutional and public policy levels, Increasing Persistence offers a compendium on college student persistence that integrates concept, theory, and research with successful practice. It is anchored by the ACT's What Works in Student Retention (WWISR) survey of 1,100 colleges and universities, an important resource that contains insights on the causes of attrition and identifies retention interventions that are most likely to enhance student persistence.?? The authors focus on three essential conditions for student success: students must learn; students must be motivated, committed, engaged, and self-regulating; and students must connect with educational programs consistent with their interests and abilities. The authors offer a detailed discussion of the four interventions that research shows are the most effective for helping students persist and succeed: assessment and course placement, developmental education initiatives, academic advising, and student transition programming. Finally, they urge broadening the current retention construct, providing guidance to policy makers, campus leaders, and individuals on the contributions they can make to student success.

Improving college access and success among Black males has garnered tremendous attention. Many social scientists have noted that Black men account for only 4.3% of the total enrollment at 4-year postsecondary institutions in the United States, the same percentage now as in 1976. Furthermore, two thirds of Black men who start college never finish. The lack of progress among Black men in higher education has caused researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to become increasingly focused on ways to increase their access and success. Offering recommendations and strategies to help advance success among Black males, this monograph provides a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of factors that promote the access, retention, and persistence of Black men at diverse institutional types (e.g., historically Black colleges and universities, predominantly White institutions, and community colleges). It delineates institutional policies, programs, practices, and other factors that encourage the success of Black men in postsecondary education. This is the 3rd issue of the 40th volume of the Jossey-Bass series ASHE Higher Education Report. Each monograph is the definitive analysis of a tough higher education issue, based on thorough research of pertinent literature and institutional experiences. Topics are identified by a national survey. Noted practitioners and scholars are then commissioned to write the reports, with experts providing critical reviews of each manuscript before publication.

Coral reef declines have been recorded for all major tropical ocean basins since the 1980s, averaging approximately 30-50% reductions in reef cover globally. These losses are a result of numerous problems, including habitat destruction, pollution, overfishing, disease, and climate change. Greenhouse gas emissions and the associated increases in ocean temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations have been implicated in increased reports of coral bleaching, disease outbreaks, and ocean acidification (OA). For the hundreds of millions of people who depend on reefs for food or livelihoods, the thousands of communities that depend on reefs for wave protection, the people whose cultural practices are tied to reef resources, and the many economies that depend on reefs for fisheries or tourism, the health and maintenance of this major global ecosystem is crucial. A growing body of research on coral physiology, ecology, molecular biology, and responses to stress has revealed potential tools to increase coral resilience. Some of this knowledge is poised to provide practical interventions in the short-term, whereas other discoveries are poised to facilitate research that may later open the doors to additional interventions. A Research Review of Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs reviews the state of science on genetic, ecological, and environmental interventions meant to enhance the persistence and resilience of coral reefs. The complex nature of corals and their associated microbiome lends itself to a wide range of possible approaches. This first report provides a summary of currently available information on the range of interventions present in the scientific literature and provides a basis for the forthcoming final report.

Coral reefs are critical to ocean and human life because they provide food, living area, storm protection, tourism income, and more. However, human-induced stressors, such as overfishing, sediment, pollution, and habitat destruction have threatened ocean ecosystems globally for decades. In the face of climate change, these ecosystems now face an array of unfamiliar challenges due to destructive rises in ocean temperature, acidity and sea level. These factors lead to an increased frequency of bleaching events, hindered growth, and a decreasing rate of calcification. Research on interventions to combat these relatively new stressors and a reevaluation of longstanding interventions is necessary to understand and protect coral reefs in this changing climate. Previous research on these methods prompts further questions regarding the decision making process for site-specific interventions. A Decision Framework for Interventions to Increase the Persistence and Resilience of Coral Reefs builds upon a previous report that reviews the state of research on methods that have been used, tested, or proposed to increase the resilience of coral reefs. This new report aims to help coral managers evaluate the specific needs of their site and navigate the 23 different interventions described in the previous report. A case study of the Caribbean, a region with low coral population plagued by disease, serves as an example for coral intervention decision making. This report provides complex coral management decision making tools, identifies gaps in coral biology and conservation research, and provides examples to help individuals and communities tailor a decision strategy to a local area.

Since the mid-1970s Spain has suffered from persistently high unemployment, as it has occurred in other parts of Europe. Although during the last few years the unemployment level has declined, there are still enormous disparities in the unemployment rate across groups, skills and regions. This thesis attempts to shed some light on the mechanisms of unemployment persistence and skill and regional mismatch in Spain. Chapter 1 provides a first introductory analysis of Spanish data. The chapter emphasises the importance of skill and regional mismatch, which may have contributed about fifty percent to the observed increase in total unemployment over the last twenty years. The chapter also studies the cyclical pattern in the Spanish unemployment, which is a very important aspect in view of its magnitude. The following three chapters are devoted to the evaluation of different mechanisms that may have been at work. In all three chapters, the analysis relies on the specification, calibration and simulation of dynamic general equilibrium models with matching on the labour market. Chapter 2 focuses on cyclical fluctuations, with particular emphasis on the role of reallocation shocks. Chapter 3 focuses on « skill mismatch »; more precisely the chapter investigates to what extent unemployment rate disparities across skill groups can be explained in terms of a « ladder effect ». Chapter 4 focuses on regional disparities. A model is built to investigate the possible determinants of regional disparities and the role of labour mobility.

Co-published with More first-generation students are attending college than ever before, and policy makers agree that increasing their participation in higher education is a matter of priority. Despite this, there is no agreed definition about the term, few institutions can quantify how many first-generation students are enrolled, or mistakenly conflate them with low-income students, and many important dimensions to the first-generation student experience remain poorly documented. Few institutions have in place a clear, well-articulated practice for assisting first-generation students to succeed. Given that first-generation students comprise over 40% of incoming freshmen, increasing their retention and graduation rates can dramatically increase an institution’s overall retention and graduation rates, and enhance its image and desirability. It is clearly in every institution’s self-interest to ensure its first-generation students succeed, to identify and count them, and understand how to support them. This book provides high-level administrators with a plan of action for deans to create the awareness necessary for meaningful long-term change, sets out a campus acclimation process, and provides guidelines for the necessary support structures.At the heart of the book are 14 first-person narratives – by first-generation students spanning freshman to graduate years – that help the reader get to grips with the variety of ethnic and economic categories to which they belong. The book concludes by defining 14 key issues that institutions need to address, and offers a course of action for addressing them. This book is intended for everyone who serves these students – faculty, academic advisors, counselors, student affairs professionals, admissions officers, and administrators – and offers a set of best practices for how two- and four-year institutions can improve the success of their first-generation student populations.An ACPA Publication

Failure often presents a valuable learning opportunity, however, students may need motivational scaffolds to protect them from the negative psychological ramifications of failure. This work explored the effectiveness of a motivation-based intervention called an ego-protective buffer (EPB), that was designed to enhance persistence after failure. An ego-protective buffer (EPB) maintains a stable sense of competence by lessening the impact of failure on one's psyche. The specific instantiation of an EPB tested here was designed to elicit a combination of internal and external attributions for failure. External attributions protect one's sense of competence by averting the blame for failure away from the self, while internal attributions encourage students to take some responsibility for remedying the failure situation. Based on this theory, we embedded an EPB into the rule structure of a computer-based genetics game and unleashed it on 143 seventh graders. In the EPB condition, students were told that winning in the game was a probabilistic outcome, dependent on a combination of chance and skill on the part of the students. In the Control condition, students were told that winning in the game was a deterministic outcome, dependent on students' skill only. Students played the game during two class periods. Measures include pre- and posttests, motivational survey measures, and in-game behaviors. The EPB did have an effect on learning, but only amongst high-failing students. High-failing EPB students learned just as much as their low-failing counterparts. This was not so in the Control condition, where high-failing students learned far less than their low-failing counterparts. So the high-failing EPB group was behaving as if they were "buffered" from the effects of failure. We also found evidence of a possible mechanism behind this learning effect. In the high-failing EPB condition, students were equally likely to persist after success and failure, while in the Control condition, students were far more likely to persist after success, exhibiting risk averse behaviors. This difference was more exaggerated in a within-subjects comparison, contrasting the same individuals in situations of high and low failure. Finally, persistence after failure was associated with learning across the full sample of subjects. Regardless of condition or failure rate, students who persisted more after failure also learned more. This study, together with the author's related body of work, provides compelling evidence that an EPB is a viable intervention for encouraging persistence in the face of failure.