BACKGROUND Mental health problems in college and their associations with academic performance are not well understood. The main aim of this study was to investigate to what extent mental health problems are associated with academic functioning. METHODS As part of the World Mental Health Surveys International College Student project, 12-month mental health problems among freshmen (N = 4921) wa...

In this work, we explore applications of automatic essay scoring (AES) to a corpus of essays written by college freshmen and discuss the challenges we faced. While most AES systems evaluate highly constrained writing, we developed a system that handles open-ended, long-form writing. We present a novel corpus for this task, containing more than 3,000 essays and drafts written for a freshman writ...

OBJECTIVE Despite research suggesting that parental involvement can affect alcohol involvement among adolescents, few studies have focused on parent-based alcohol prevention strategies among college undergraduates. We report the results of a randomized trial of a parent-based intervention (PBI) in a sample of college freshmen. METHOD Across two cohorts, 724 incoming freshman-parent dyads comp...

OBJECTIVE To assess weight changes, exercise and diet behaviors among college students from the beginning of freshman year until the end of senior year. DESIGN Longitudinal observational study. SETTING Private university in St. Louis, Missouri. PARTICIPANTS College students (138 females, 66 males). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES Weight and height were measured, body mass index (BMI) was calculat...

This paper estimates the effects of freshman athletic participation on reading comprehension, mathematics, and critical thinking controlling for pre-college aptitude and other influences. A group of 3,331 students from 18 four-year and 5 two-year colleges and universities participated in initial testing during fall of their freshman year. Testing involved pre-college surveys and the Collegiate ...

We have measured upper-division physics majors' performance using two research-based conceptual instruments in E&M, the BEMA [1] and the CUE (Colorado Upper Division Electrostatics assessment[2].) The BEMA has been given pre/post in freshman E&M (Physics II) courses, and the BEMA and CUE have been given pre/post in several upper-division E&M courses. Some of these data extend over 10 semesters....