Search

College students often experience and report feeling stressed within the context of their daily lives. This empirical study examines the effect of personal stress on academic performance in an introductory economics course at a representative regional university. 105 students were surveyed and completed a standardized psychometric instrument revealing the extent of perceived stress. The resulting data were analyzed using an educational production function estimated by ordinary least squares. After controlling for student demographic characteristics, academic attributes, social environmental factors, and student confidence, the results reveal that measured personal stress significantly reduced student academic performance. Keywords: stress, course performance, metacognition, economics, college students, Introduction The experience of college has long been recognized as a stressful period of life. The typical college student is maturing from adolescence into adulthood and is often experiencing a [...]

This study examines the tuition elasticity of student enrollment for a public regional comprehensive master's university, Pittsburg State University in Kansas. Tuition elasticity is a measure of the responsiveness of student enrollment decisions due to changes in tuition over time. This measure is useful as it indicates how changes in tuition policy will affect revenue. Using 32 years of institutional, state, and national data, elasticity measures are estimated for various cohorts of students, including freshmen, transfers, undergraduates and graduate students. The model controls for factors other than tuition that are also likely to influence enrollment, such as: the availability of scholarships, household income, the relative cost of alternative schools, the economic environment, and the pool of recent high school graduates. The results indicate that freshman students are more sensitive to changes in tuition than other undergraduate students in general - a one percent increase in tuition and fees is expected to result in a decrease in freshman enrollment of between 1.19 and 1.29 percent, holding all else constant. Both undergraduate transfer students and graduate students are found to be insensitive to increases in tuition and fees. These and other results are discussed relative to their policy implications for similar institutions contemplating increases in tuition. Keywords: enrollment, tuition, elasticity, student decisions, pricing, Introduction Diminished taxpayer funding for higher education has resulted in an increased reliance on tuition revenues for most American public colleges and universities (Bauman (2018), Mitchell et. al (2016) and [...]

This paper reports the development and implementation of a multi-year program targeting a cohort of at-risk pre-freshmen. The program, called BOSS Camp (Business Opportunities for Success School), was designed to [...]

Promotion and tenure decisions are often linked to student evaluations of teaching. Previous studies show that some teachers try to influence student evaluation scores by 'watering-down' course content and lowering [...]

This paper presents an evaluation of Choices & Changes, an economics education program designed to teach 'at-risk' children in elementary and junior high school that they can control their future by making wise choices and investing in themselves. Using program-specific instruments and a national sample of approximately 1600 students, a controlled experiment was conducted to determine the effect of Choices & Changes on student learning and attitudes. The experimental data were analyzed using a simultaneous model estimated by 2SLS with correction for self-selection due to sample attrition between pre- and post-test observations. The results indicate that Choices & Changes had a positive effect on economic understanding for each grade level examined, ceteris paribus. Significant positive effects on attitudes were found in only one of the four student groups. These findings suggest that Choices & Changes is meeting its short-run objective of producing cognitive understanding of economic concepts and that the attitudes of at-risk students can be altered but may require additional intervention., Choices & Changes is an economic education program designed specifically to help 'at-risk' elementary and junior high school students use economic concepts and reasoning in their decision making processes. The [...]

The ability to use library resources to identify, access, and retrieve information is essential to the successful completion of a college education. To date, however, economists have ignored the role [...]

Abstract: The influence of social capital on economic activities has been a central theme in the literature for quite a long time, but the relationship between social connectedness and school choice has not been addressed. If the primary objective of social capital is to create cohesiveness through the connectivity of community members, then it is clear that parents’ school choice decisions are influenced by the groups or organizations to which they belong. Ni (2007) argues that parents’ decisions not only influence students’ academic performance, but also affect school expenditures. Thus, it is worthwhile to investigate the effect of social capital on school performance. The measurement of social capital has been debated for a long time. In this paper we create a geographically bounded community around schools in Mississippi employing GIS instead of following the commonly used political boundaries such as school district or county to measure social capital. Then we estimate the social capital stock for each school to analyze the relationship between the school's performance and existing social capital. Data were collected from the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development (NRCRD) and the Mississippi Department of Education for the academic year 2005–2006. We find that schools located in communities with a higher stock of social capital significantly outperform those with relatively low levels of social capital. The results also suggest that students’ race and socio-economic status significantly reduce primary school performance, holding all else equal. This research helps to understand the importance of social capital from spatial perspectives and will guide policy makers in future resource allocations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Advocates for educational reform frequently call for policies to increase competition between schools because it is argued that market forces naturally lead to greater efficiencies, including improved student learning, when schools face competition. Researchers examining this issue are confronted with difficulties in defining reasonable measures of competition within local educational markets. We approach the problem through the application of Geographical Information System (GIS) tools to the development of a school competition index (SCI) for the state of Mississippi. The SCI captures the degree of competition each public school in the state faces from peer private schools spatially located within their local market area. We find that higher degrees of competition from private schools significantly increase public primary and high school efficiency, as measured by the proficiency rates on high-stakes examinations. It is anticipated that the current results will inform policymakers regarding the viability of competition-based reforms. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The authors examine the relationship between students' locus of control and their evaluation of teaching in a traditional principles of economics course. Locus of control is a psychological construct that identifies an individual's beliefs about the degree of personal control that can be exercised over his or her environment. Students with an internal locus-of-control orientation accept responsibility for control over their environment whereas those with an external orientation believe that they have little control or power to affect personal outcomes. The authors entered students' Rotter scale scores derived from the standard instrument used to measure locus of control orientation into an empirical ordered probit model estimated to explain the determination of student evaluation of teaching scores. The results indicate that more internally oriented students had a greater probability of assigning above average evaluation marks with respect to instructor performance whereas more externally oriented students had a greater probability of assigning average and below average instructor evaluation marks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on an experimental study conducted to determine the relative effectiveness a telecourse on economics, Economics U$A, on a variety of student groups. Instruction through the medium of video presentations; Integration of Economics U$A video lessons and corresponding materials into traditional lecture courses; Evaluation of Economics U$A conducted within the institutional context of Western Illinois University.

Presents information on the relationship between course length and student learning. Efficiency of computer-managed instruction in terms of student time; Determination of total classroom instruction time by accreditation and administrative rules; Relationship between course length, study time and student learning.