Perna, Laura W

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Subject: Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research ×

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 23
  • Publication
    Making Sense of a Looking Glass World
    (2014-05-30) Zemsky, Robert M; Shaman, Susan; Perna, Laura W
    As the Walrus in Lewis Carroll's knows, it is the sorting out that matters most. And in colleges and universities, just as in oysters, those of the largest size and most prestige will almost certainly insist on being grouped together, no matter what the consequences. Working with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation we have set for ourselves the task of doing just that—using data drawn from the U.S. Department of Education's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) to sort American colleges and universities into recognizable clusters that or segments that facilitate the making of comparisons within groups of similar institutions. No less, we seek a set of indices or measures that document the performance of these institutions in terms of access and completions. And to accomplish this latter task, we seek a reasonable means of describing each institution's undergraduate student body along four gauges of diversity: economic, race and ethnicity, age, and geography.
  • Publication
    Exploring the College Enrollment of Parents: A Descriptive Analysis
    (2010-01-01) Perna, Laura W; Walsh, Erin J.; Fester, Rachel
    Despite the substantial size of the population, relativelty little research has focused on the status and experiences of undergraduate parents. Using descriptive analyses of data from the NPSAS:04, this study provides a starting point for campus administrators, public policymakers, and educational researchers who seek to identify ways to better understand the characteristics of this population.
  • Publication
    State Policy Leadership Vacuum: Performance and Policy in Washington Higher Education
    (2012-01-01) Perna, Laura W; Finney, Joni E; Callan, Patrick
  • Publication
    Understanding the Human Capital Benefits of a Government-Funded International Scholarship Program: An Exploration of Kazakhstan's Bolashak Program
    (2015-01-01) Perna, Laura W; Orosz, Kata; Jumakulov, Zakir
    This study utilizes qualitative research methods to explore the human capital benefits of one government-sponsored international scholarship program — Kazakhstan's Bolashak Scholars Program — and how program characteristics and other forces promote and limit these benefits. The findings raise a number of questions for policymakers, administrators, and researchers about how a government-sponsored international scholarship program should be structured so as to maximize human capital develoment for individuals and the sponsoring nation.
  • Publication
    State of Attainment: Three Ways That States Can Help More Students Access Higher Levels of Education
    (2014-11-01) Perna, Laura W; Finney, Joni E
    Fourteenth place. That's where the United States ranked in the proportion of 25- to 34-year-olds who achieved postsecondary degrees, according to a 2012 report by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Unless the U.S. increases the share of the population that has completed a college degree, the country will lack the educational skills and training required to meet the workforce demands of a global economy. Sixty-three percent of job researchers predict, will require education beyond high school in 2018. For the U.S. to be competitive on a global scale, it must devote more effort to closing the considerable gaps in degree attainment that persist across demographic groups. The groups least likely to earn a degree are students from lower-income families, blacks, Hispanics, and those whose parents have not attended college.
  • Publication
    Are There Metrics for MOOCS From Social Media?
    (2015-12-01) Ruby, Alan; Perna, Laura W; Boruch, Robert; Wang, Nicole
    Since "the year of the MOOC" in 2012, the effectiveness of massive open online course (MOOCs) has been widely debated. Some argue that MOOCs are not an effective mode of instructional delivery because of low completion rates. In the interest of developing alternative indicators of performance this study draws from recent efforts to measure engagement in social media, as well as from research on indicators of student engagement in traditional college courses. Using data from 16 Coursera MOOCs offered by the University of Pennsylvania we calculate standardized access rates for lectures and assessments. While these indicators have clear limitations as measures of educational progress they offer a different, more nuanced understanding of the level and nature of users' engagement with a MOOC. This paper shows that a very small share of uers takes up available opportunities to access course content but notes that the standardized access rates compare favorably with those for social media sites and with response rates to large-scale direct mail marketing programs. For MOOC providers and platform managers, indicators like the ones developed in this study may be a useful first step in monitoring the extent to which different types and combinations of activities may be providing better opportunities for learning.
  • Publication
    Apples and Oranges: Comparing the Backgrounds and Academic Trajectories of International Baccalaureate (IB) Students to a Matched Comparison Group
    (2013-08-01) Rodriguez, Awilda; Sirinides, Philip M; Perna, Laura W.; May, Henry; Ransom, Tafaya S; Yee, April L
    This report presents findings from a retrospective study of the academic histories of International Baccalaureate (IB) students and other students in the state of Florida. The IB Diploma Program is an internationally recognized college-preparatory curriculum designed to provide students with a rigorous and comprehensive academic experience. IB has grown dramatically in recent years and is thought by many to be among the best college-preparatory programs in existence. As such, there is tremendous interest in the potential impacts of IB, but any attempts to examine those impacts must deal with selection bias that results from the voluntary participation of schools and students. Failure to do so makes it impossible to determine whether the performance of participating students was actually influenced by IB, or whether the outcomes for these students would have been just as good without IB. As a critical step in understanding the impacts of IB, the analyses presented in this report examined the selection mechanisms behind IB participation across Florida, the state with the second highest representation of IB programs in the nation. We use longitudinal student and school-level data from 1995 through 2009 from the Florida K-20 Education Data Warehouse (EDW) to characterize individual students’ educational histories from elementary school through high school and into college. To address issues of selection bias, we use propensity score methods (Rosenbaum & Rubin, 1983) to adjust for preexisting differences between IB and non-IB students.
  • Publication
    A Story of Decline: Performance and Policy in Illinois Higher Education
    (2011-11-01) Perna, Laura W; Finney, Joni E; Callan, Patrick
    In the mid-and late-1990s, Illinois was a top-performing state in preparing students for college, enrolling residents in college, and keeping college affordable: • Compared with residents of other states, large percentages of Illinoisans earned a high school diploma or a General Education Development (GED) diploma by age 24; earned high scores on college entrance exams; and enrolled in college immediately after high school. • Illinois led the nation in the proportion of young adults (ages 18 to 24) and working-age adults (ages 25 to 44) who were enrolled in college. • Illinoiswas a leader in keeping higher education affordable for families, as measured by (1) the share of family income required to attend the state's public two-year and four-year institutions and (2) the availability of state need-based financial aid. During the past decade, however, the state has experienced substantial declines in higher education performance. At the same time, the state has made no progress toward ameliorating a persistent pattern of inequity in higher education.
  • Publication
    Introduction to "Preparing Today's Students for Tomorrow's Jobs in Metropolitan America"
    (2013-01-01) Perna, Laura W
    Although disagreeing about how much of an increase is requred, most scholars agree that the United States must raise the educational attainment of its population in order to meet the knowledge requirements of future jobs (see Zumeta 2010 for a discussion of this debate). In Help Wanted: Projections of Jobs and Education Requirements through 2018, Anthony Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Jeff Strohl (2010) attempt to quantify this need. They project that, by 2018, about two-thirds (63 percent) of all jobs (including both new and replacement jobs) will require at least some postsecondary education or training, up from 59 percent in 2008 and just 28 percent in 1973 (Carnevale, Smith, and Strohl 2010). Their projections further suggest that "most job openings for people with a high school education or less will be low-wage jobs, and many of these will be part-time or transition jobs" (Carnevale 2010: vii). Carenvale, Smith, and Strohl demonstrate int heir chapter in this volume that workers with postsecondary education will have access to a wide range of occupations, whereas workers with no more than a high school diploma will be concentrated in blue collar, sales and office support, and food and personal services occupations.
  • Publication
    Reflections on Tinto's South Africa Lectures
    (2014-01-01) Perna, Laura W
    Providing reflections on Prof. Vincent Tinto's South Africa lectures is an incredibly honour. Like countless other scholars and practitioners in the field of higher educatin administration, I have long relied on Tinto's work to provide a foundation for my own efforts to understand how to improve students' college-related outcomes. In his first lecture, Tinto reflects on the "flash of recognition" that occurred when he learned about Durkheim's theory of suicide. Similarly, I vividly remember reading the second edition of his book, Leaving College (University of Chicago Press), in my apartment in Ann Arbor when I was a doctoral student at the University of Michigan. The way that he used theory to inform his conceptual model of student departure was incredibly helpful to me, as I worked to understand how to conceptualise my dissertation study of the predictors of the choice of college that students attend. I am one of the many thousands who have cited this book — as well as many of Tinto's other incredibly useful publications — over the course of my career.