Although graduation rates have interested stakeholders, educational researchers, and policymakers for some time, little progress has been made on the overall graduation rate at four-year state colleges. Even though selective admission based on academic indicators such as high school GPA and ACT/SAT have widely been used in the USA for years, and recent statistics show that less than 40% of students graduate from four-year state colleges in four years in the US. The authors propose using an ensemble of analytic models that considers cost as a better form of analysis that can be used as input to decision support systems to inform decision makers and help them choose intervention methods. This article uses ten years of data for 10,000 students and applies ten analytical models to find the best predictor of at-risk students. This research also uses the receiver operating characteristic curve to help determine the most cost-effective trade-off between false positive and false negative levels.

This chapter presents a general and practical guideline that is intended to introduce the traditional visualization methods (word clouds), and the advanced visualization methods including interactive visualization (heatmap matrix) and dynamic visualization (dashboard), which can be applied in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research. This chapter also presents the potentials of each visualization method for assisting researchers in choosing the most appropriate one in the web-based research study. Graduate students, educational researchers, and practitioners can contribute to take strengths from each visual analytical method to enhance the reach of significant research findings into the public sphere. By leveraging the novel visualization techniques used in the web-based research study, while staying true to the analytical methods of research design, graduate students, educational researchers, and practitioners will gain a broader understanding of big data and analytics for data use and representation in the field of education.

PurposeTo obtain optimal deliverables, more and more crowdsourcing platforms allow contest teams to submit tentative solutions and update scores/rankings on public leaderboards. Such feedback-seeking behavior for progress benchmarking pertains to the team representation activity of boundary spanning. The literature on virtual team performance primarily focuses on team characteristics, among which network closure is generally considered a positive factor. This study further examines how boundary spanning helps mitigate the negative impact of network closure.Design/methodology/approachThis study collected data of 9,793 teams in 246 contests from Kaggle.com. Negative binomial regression modeling and linear regression modeling are employed to investigate the relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.FindingsWhereas network closure turns out to be a negative asset for virtual teams to seek platform feedback, boundary spanning mitigates its impact on team performance. On top of such a partial mediation, boundary spanning experience and previous contest performance serve as potential moderators.Practical implicationsThe findings offer helpful implications for researchers and practitioners on how to break network closure and encourage boundary spanning with the establishment of facilitating structures in crowdsourcing contests.Originality/valueThe study advances the understanding of theoretical relationships among network closure, boundary spanning and team performance in crowdsourcing contests.

PurposeThis paper extends the current literature on app engagement to identify dynamic factors that affect app engagement and the value-creation pathway that connect these factors with app engagement.Design/methodology/approachSurvey data were collected from 299 app users to test the proposed research model.FindingsThe study found that the perceived effectiveness of evolution content and that of evolution speed impose both individual and joint positive effects on app identity, which serves as the mediation mechanism that connects these dynamic factors with app engagement.Originality/valueThis study takes the user perspective to explore how user perceptions of the effectiveness of app evolution content and speed, which represent unique user experiences in the app context, cultivate app engagement by enhancing app identity. Specifically, this study reveals the intertwined relationship among perceived effectiveness of app evolution, app identity, and app engagement.

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