The aim is to empower all students to achieve academic success by overcoming the educational barriers that exist within the school system. This thesis examines what sociological factors are at play that encourages the academic success of Black students. The emphasis will be to identify how other Black students can replicate the success of their high achieving peers. Another theme in this thesis focuses around the idea of success and who it belongs to versus which groups of learners are ignored. Other related themes look at the power of educators to transform the lives of students where schooling is viewed as a family approach offering hope for all stakeholders. Furthermore, the resiliency of Black learners and their ability to rise above racial pressures and adversity is an important theme that addresses the need for policy to change and the implementation of anti-racist strategies.

The purpose of this study was to examine the reflective essays of first-year, first-generation college students for evidence of self-directed learning at the conclusion of their first semester at the university. A phenomenological qualitative method was employed and a content analysis rating rubric used to identify and code evidence related to four themes: Self Awareness, Decoding and Pattern Fit, Autonomy/Responsibility, and Academic Success. The study findings indicated that first-year, first-generation college students have the capacity to take ownership of their learning in ways exemplified by self-directed learners. Participants demonstrated deep reflection and metacognition and their essays revealed unexpected student vulnerability as they voiced fears and hopes with a nearly innocent transparency and candor. Study findings also emphasized the importance of a support system that includes coursework designed to facilitate understanding of individual learner characteristics, emphasize strategies to maximize learner efforts that lead to successful outcomes, and empower students to become more self-directed. This study also expands the field of adult education by providing evidence that learner control is a key component of self-direction and is positively correlated to academic success. Ample evidence related to metacognition, self-regulation, and learner control was identified in the essay data.

This study investigated the relationship between digital literacy and academic performance in the context of an online learning high school program aimed at students from underprivileged groups. The study proposed that digital literacy should be understood as a construct of several variables that create a progression from basic--though indispensable--physical conditions of access to technology, to complex skills and attitudes that permit a student to succeed in an online learning situation. Using path analysis as a methodological tool, the study tested a three-stage model that measured the chain of effects of the variables that integrate the digital literacy construct both among them, and on academic performance as the overall dependent variable of the study. The model organized the variables in three stages: conditions of access to technology; general digital skills (that included motivation, knowledge and skills to use digital technology, as well as frequency and diversity of usage practices of technology); and context-specific skills required to successfully use technology in a particular domain (in this particular case, online distance learning). The study found that in the particular online learning context of this investigation, better conditions of access to technology had a mediated and strong positive effect on academic performance by increasing the use of Internet for social and entertainment purposes, which in turn led to a higher use of the learning platform software and to better digital and academic skills. These skills had a positive effect on academic performance through independent learning as a mediating variable. A second finding--that runs in part in an opposite direction--was that better conditions of access increased the use of social networks, which had both a positive effect on independent learning in terms of increasing familiarity with the Internet and computer resources, and a negative effect, perhaps simply because the time one spends with social media may diminish the time one has available for learning. / text

Research on the current condition of education within the black community suggests that there are significant obstacles to the academic success of black children. Disparities between black student’s performance, when compared to others show that blacks fall behind other students on standardized test scores, rate of those college attendance and completing high school educations. An exploration of contemporary issues in black education and black student academic achievement will help clarify the scope of these problems and possible underlying causes. It is hypothesized that the challenges facing today’s black student’s academic achievement have their roots in the events that occurred during the desegregation process of the mid to late 1960’s. The educational history of the Sam Schwarz School in Hempstead, Texas will serve as a case study of how the desegregation process represented a collective trauma experienced by Hempstead’s black community. / text

Since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, schools with high populations of at-risk students who are not meeting academic standards must provide supplementary educational services (SES) to their struggling learners. This study examines the tutoring program of an urban Texas elementary school that rapidly improved its state accountability over the course of a few years. Through interviews with teachers and an analysis of their lesson plans and standardized assessment data, several themes emerged that were identified as factors leading to the school’s academic success. / text

Institutions of higher learning are currently faced with the crisis of finding appropriate criteria for undergraduate admission. This concern has been sparked by the fact that matriculation grades are no longer seen as an accurate reflection of students' academic potential. As tertiary education is becoming more expensive, it is therefore becoming more and more important to select only students who have a realistic chance of being successful in their studies. The main aim of this study is to validate the Situation Specific Evaluation Expert (SPEEX) as a predictor of academic success of first year students of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. The design used in this study is a non-experimental correlational design. This design was selected because the investigation of this study is aimed at determining the presence or absence of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables without specific reference to causality. The sample of this study consisted of a total of 140 mechanical engineering student at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. This sample was the total number of students from the Mechanical Engineering department who enrolled for mechanical engineering courses for the year 2000. The sample consisted of 94% males and females 6% females. Subject matter experts from industry as well as those involved in the training of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon selected competencies, which were hypothesised to be indicative of a potentially successful student. Based on the selected competencies the assessment battery was compiled with the selected indices being considered as predictor variables. A multiple regression analysis was performed on data in order to establish the predictive validity of the assessment battery. SPEEX 2502 (Language proficiency) consistently showed a positive correlation on the prediction of academic success. / Thesis (MA (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Institutions of higher learning are currently faced with the crisis of finding appropriate criteria for undergraduate admission. This concern has been sparked by the fact that matriculation grades are no longer seen as an accurate reflection of students' academic potential. As tertiary education is becoming more expensive, it is therefore becoming more and more important to select only students who have a realistic chance of being successful in their studies. The main aim of this study is to validate the Situation Specific Evaluation Expert (SPEEX) as a predictor of academic success of first year students of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. The design used in this study is a non-experimental correlational design. This design was selected because the investigation of this study is aimed at determining the presence or absence of the relationship between the independent and dependent variables without specific reference to causality. The sample of this study consisted of a total of 140 mechanical engineering student at the Vaal Triangle Technikon. This sample was the total number of students from the Mechanical Engineering department who enrolled for mechanical engineering courses for the year 2000. The sample consisted of 94% males and females 6% females. Subject matter experts from industry as well as those involved in the training of Mechanical Engineering at the Vaal Triangle Technikon selected competencies, which were hypothesised to be indicative of a potentially successful student. Based on the selected competencies the assessment battery was compiled with the selected indices being considered as predictor variables. A multiple regression analysis was performed on data in order to establish the predictive validity of the assessment battery. SPEEX 2502 (Language proficiency) consistently showed a positive correlation on the prediction of academic success. / Thesis (MA (Industrial Psychology))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

The present study investigated the key determinants of Chinese students’ academic success in terms of GPA and the number of credit hours earned. The determinants investigated included gender, age, prior academic performance, academic self-efficacy, the TOPIK score, self-perceived Korean and English proficiency, and the previous length of Korean and English study. This study specifically focused on three research questions concerning the prediction of Chinese students’ academic success in Korean universities, the additional contribution of Korean and English language proficiency, and the examination of prediction patterns for undergraduate and graduate students. A questionnaire was issued and collected from 138 undergraduate and 63 graduate Chinese students studying in 27 different Korean universities. The questionnaire consisted of four sections: demographic information, academic background, language proficiency and psychological factors. Correlation and multiple regression analyses were conducted to address the proposed research questions. The findings demonstrated that traditional factors, including gender and prior academic performance, were effective predictors of academic success. However, academic self-efficacy did not play an influential role in participants’ academic success. Language proficiency had a moderate effect on Chinese students’ academic success, which is consistent with previous studies that reported a positive statistically significant relationship between language proficiency and academic success. In this study’s context, Korean proficiency contributed to undergraduate GPA and graduate credit hours whereas both Korean and English proficiency contributed to graduate GPA. The different natures of undergraduate and graduate studies determined that the predictors of undergraduate and graduate students’ academic success were different. The determinants of international students’ academic success are complex and not yet completely understood, and language proficiency is only one of the factors contributing to international students’ academic success. The present study addressed the research gap by integrating theoretical constructs from both psychology and language education, and also by exploring the relationships between language proficiency and academic success in a less researched test, TOPIK, and in two second languages, Korean and English, at the same time. The findings contribute to the overall understanding of international students’ academic success, in particular the success of Chinese students studying in Korean universities. / Thesis (Master, Education) -- Queen's University, 2014-04-23 14:54:05.315

abstract: School failure among children and adolescents has long been a serious issue in Myanmar. The recent statistics indicate that a large number of adolescents do not complete high school. As a consequence, they lose prosperous work opportunities and ability to earn an adequate income. These outcomes highlight a need to study the factors that hamper academic success of adolescents in Myanmar. Academic success is a complex concept and needs a multidimensional perspective to gain an accurate understanding of factors associated with it. Therefore, this study used an ecological risk/protective model and identified risk and protective factors that contribute to academic success of adolescents through five ecological systems of an adolescent: individual, family, peer, school, and community. This study was conducted at one government and monastic school in Myanmar. The data was collected from a sample of 50 high school students, parents and teachers through interviews and focus group discussions. This study reviewed and analyzed the data by using constant comparative method. A total of 27 distinctive ecological risk and protective factors that contribute to adolescents’ academic success in Myanmar emerged from the study. The findings of this study provided important recommendations to inform policy and practice interventions for adolescents to improve their academic performance. The findings also highlighted the influence of schools, families and communities on academic success of adolescents and a need of school social work services in Myanmar to address school failure of adolescents. Last but not least, this study contributed to the local literature by expanding the knowledge base on the concepts of ecological model and strengths-based perspective which are very new for educators and social workers in Myanmar. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Work 2018

The problem of this thesis is the degree of aspiration (level of aspiration) exhibited by students with high or low levels of academic performance. With these levels established by the use of a standardized test designed for this purpose, this study is concerned more specifically with testing two hypotheses.