Predicting first-time-in-college students’ degree completion outcomes

Higher Education - About one-third of college students drop out before finishing their degree. The majority of those remaining will take longer than 4 years to complete their degree at...     

Brain Engagement During a Cognitive Flexibility Task Relates to Academic Performance in English Learners

English Learners (ELs), students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, are a fast-growing, understudied, group of students in the U.S. with unique learning challenges. Cognitive flexibility—the ability to switch between task demands with ease—may be an important factor in learning for ELs as they have to manage learning in their non-dominant language and access knowledge in multiple languages. We used functional MRI to measure cognitive flexibility brain activity in a group of Hispanic middle school ELs (N = 63) and related it to their academic skills. We found that brain engagement during the cognitive flexibility task was related to both out-of-scanner reading and math measures. These relationships were observed across the brain, including in cognitive control, attention, and default mode networks. This work suggests the real-world importance of cognitive flexibility for adolescent ELs, where individual differences in brain engagement were associated with educational outcomes.     

The Core-Periphery Problem in Communication Research: A Network Analysis of Leading Publication

Is communication and media research a deeply international field? Are there real and extensive collaborations between various cultures represented on the highest level? In our current research, we analyzed the most recent 620 articles written by 1456 authors and published in 63 SCImago Scopus Q1-ranked journals in communication and media studies (CMS) to reveal the patterns of scientific contribution, the well-connected network of winner-countries, and the sporadic presence of loser or Matthew-countries. We used CATMA and Gephi software to analyze and visualize the distribution patterns behind scientific publications. Our results show that the network of collaboration in CMS is very sparse, most of the scientific publications are written by authors from a very few winner-countries, and the real loser of the field is obviously the CEE region with its lonely, disconnected, and marginalized representatives.     

The Global South’s Participation in the International Community of Communication Scholars: From an Eastern European Point of View

In this paper, we present the Eastern European (EE) region as part of the Global South with all its disadvantages, and we will argue that “Sovietization” of the region is, in many respects, similar to the colonization of different world regions. We also show that the disadvantages of the region still exist after the transition, and EE has an especially low contribution to communication and media studies (CMS). With a brief bibliometric analysis in CMS, the paper demonstrates that a strong bias holds against EE authors and editorial board members in leading periodicals in CMS, and at least 95% of EE research remains unnoticed by international scholars. We further argue that this phenomenon is obviously harmful to the field of CMS. This paper not only points out the general difficulties Eastern European communication scholars might face when trying to make their research internationally visible, but it also snatches at the chance to introduce a novel, a respected but internationally yet unnoticed Easter European (Hungarian) communication theory, namely, the Participation Theory of Communication.