TY  - JOUR
AB  - Purpose Experiencing academic difficulty can deter students’ academic momentum, decreasing the speed with which they complete coursework and increasing the odds that they will not persist to a credential. The purpose of this paper is to expand upon an existing framework that investigates students’ academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses by adding additional co-enrollment variables that may influence academic performance in introductory gateway courses.Design/methodology/approach This study uses quantile regression to better understand academic difficulty in co-enrolled courses and the impact that students’ co-enrollment patterns may have on their success in focal introductory gateway courses.Findings This study revealed significant relationships between student success and co-enrollment patterns, including: the disciplinary alignment of the course with a student’s major, the student’s co-enrollment in other difficult courses and experiencing below average academic performance in a co-enrolled course. Further, impact of these relationships often differed by students’ performance quantile in the focal course.Practical implications The results point to factors related to the student and their co-enrolled courses that faculty, academic advisors and curriculum committees can consider as they design general education requirements within and across disciplinary majors.Originality/value This approach advances the understanding of how a prescribed curriculum produces interdependent pathways that can promote or deter students’ success through the organization of curricular requirements and student course taking. The paper provides a generalizable methodology that can be used by other universities to investigate curricular pathways that have the potential to reduce student success.
VL  - 12
IS  - 1
SN  - 2050-7003
DO  - 10.1108/JARHE-11-2018-0252
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/JARHE-11-2018-0252
AU  - DeMonbrun Robert Matthew
AU  - Brown Michael
AU  - Teasley Stephanie D.
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - Enrollment patterns and students’ risk of academic difficulty
T2  - Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 97
EP  - 108
Y2  - 2024/04/18
ER  -