Following the Mobile Student: Can We Develop the Capacity for a Comprehensive Database to Assess Student Progression?
| Title: | Following the Mobile Student: Can We Develop the Capacity for a Comprehensive Database to Assess Student Progression? |
| Author: | Ewell, Peter T. Schild, Paula R. Paulson, Karen |
| Date: | 2003 |
| Catalog #: | |
| Price: | FREE |
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| Description: |
The need for complete measurements of
student success in the nation’s colleges
and universities is critical today. To
thrive as a nation, we must ensure that
more students reach their educational goals.
Unfortunately, current enrollment statistics and
graduation rates don’t tell us enough about the
details of student achievement to allow us to
develop effective policies for student success. A major problem in measuring student success
in postsecondary education is the difficulty in
tracking students’ progress as they transfer from
one institution to another. Data on these students
are collected, of course, but such student-level
data, often termed “unit-record” (UR) data,
generally are specific to each institution. That
makes it difficult to determine whether a “dropout”
at one school goes on to complete a degree at
another. In short, we know that hundreds of
thousands of students transfer each year, and we
know that current data on student retention
reported at the institutional level are incomplete
and probably inaccurate, but we have no way of
knowing the extent of those inaccuracies. Funded by the Lumina Foundation for Education. |