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Article: Factors affecting student drop out from the university introductory physics course, including the anomaly of the Ontario double cohort.(Report)
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of Physics
- Article date:
- June 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 NRC Research Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Abstract: The course drop-out rate is the fraction of students per year who drop a course after starting it. This statistic is important both as a measure of the difficulty or relevance of the course compared to others at a university, and as one indication of the success of measures taken to improve teaching. The drop-out rate of students from the first-year university physics course at Trent University increased from about 8% in the 1980s to over 20% in 1999, primarily under the same instructor, with the exception of the Ontario "double-cohort" years 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 when it plummeted to about 9% before rebounding in 2005-2006. A similar decrease in this rate for ...