Hi Everyone,
A couple weeks ago, we featured John Strucker's article about
"attendance turbulence", looking at the prevalence of students stopping
class for a period of time, and a proposed support for this habit. This
stop-and-go attendance pattern has been studied for some years now, and
we will be discussing this concept in a guest discussion in January with
Steve Reder about his article "Concepts of Participation and Program
Support". To help prepare for this topic, I thought it might be
interesting to look at some research from 1998 and look back at an
article from issue 2A, which looks at Learner Motivation from different
angles.

Stopping Out, Not Dropping Out: 
Students and teachers may perceive withdrawing from a program
differently
by Alisa Belzer
http://www.ncsall.net/?id=417

This describes a study which followed learners until they dropped out
for a while and looked at their and the teachers perceptions of dropping
out. Please take a look at this and let us know what your impressions
are!

All the best,
Julie

Julie McKinney
Discussion List Moderator
World Education/NCSALL
jmckinney at worlded.org